by John Burdett
When he leaves, she makes an effort and reads the four gospels in the Thai translation, then goes to the beginning and reads Genesis before losing concentration. She can truthfully say she has never heard such infantile mumbo jumbo in her entire life. Christianity, it seems, is a miracle religion, with the blind being restored to sight, lame people suddenly walking, the dead raised, and to top it all that enigmatic fellow who talked in riddles managing to resurrect himself and walk around with the holes from the crucifixion still in his body. And what about the God himself, who happens to be male of course, who started it all? What a jerk to plant those two trees in paradise and then tell Adam and Eve not to eat their fruit. In her mind the whole book is a kind of extension of Mitch Turner's fantasy world. The Simpsons is more compelling.
Fed up with being the recipient of condescension, she gives him her view of the Christian Bible straight, without pulling any punches, and waits for the reaction. Strange expressions pass across his face; his forehead is alive with furrows; then: "Actually, you're probably right, Christianity is total bullshit. See, I'm going into politics one day, and in this country you need a church to get anywhere in public service. You've shown me I have a ways to go. I should thank you for that."
Frowning, she asks a question that would never have occurred to her prior to exposure to Washington. "You're going to run for president one day?"
Mitch's face turns grave, as if she has hit a personal truth too deep for discussion. He makes a tolerant smile but does not reply.
Chanya is not amused this time. This man is simply a tangle of tricks, a lightning-fast but disembodied mind spitting out explanations that change from moment to moment. Maybe politics is the one profession where he really will excel?
Chanya's diary shows that their relationship began to deteriorate from that moment on. She sees that alcohol is having a negative effect, indeed he begins to be an increasingly nasty drunk, and she stops giving him wine. He, on the other hand, has started drinking at home for the first time in his life (he claims). She seems wearied by the continual conflict and does not trouble to record their arguments except one in which Mitch Turner takes the side of feminism.
Chanya: "So here all the women are men. You have only men in this country. Half have pussies, the other half have dicks, but you are all men. Women walk like men, talk like men, call each other assholes and cunts just like men. In other words, two hundred and eighty million people are looking for something soft to fuck." She flashes him her most brilliant smile. "No wonder I make so much money."
He flinches, searching for a way to guide the conversation. (She thinks it is his future political personality he's airing here.) Quietly and sincerely: "Women gained their independence. Maybe they exaggerate a bit, but the way they see it, they were dominated by men, almost to the point of being slaves."
"So now they're slaves of your system. The system doesn't love them or treat them well, it only fucks them. They have to slave all day in offices, work work work to make somebody rich. After work they're exhausted, but they go off looking for men. How is that an improvement?"
"But you prostitute yourself for men. So you're a slave to money."
"When you say money, you give it farang meaning. When I say it, I give it Thai meaning."
"What's the Thai meaning?"
"Freedom. I turn trick lasts maybe an hour, two hours, if I want I can live on the money for the rest of the week. I'm not dominated by man, and I'm not dominated by system. I'm free."
"You're still prostituting yourself. You're still working."
"Ah, you see you contradict yourself. I'm working just the same as other women, you just said it."
"But you sell your body. How's that being a good Buddhist?"
"You don't understand. I only prostitute part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha." Shaking her finger at him: "What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way."
"What way? I use my brain for my work. That's not prostitution."
"Thanee told me many times Washington professionals like you don't agree with the president, the way he's doing things. He's very dangerous, could have whole world hating America. You told me he has to divide the world into good and evil because he can only count up to two. But you work for him, let him use your brains for schemes that will bring trouble on whole world. That's prostitution. Could be very very bad karma for you. Maybe you come back as cockroach."
Mitch Turner bursts out laughing. He seems to admire the wacky ingenuity of her argument.
Chanya in a fix, don't know what to do about this guy.
She thinks that probably the affair would have continued to deteriorate in the way of such affairs, they would have gone their separate paths, perhaps she would have had to leave Washington, perhaps she would have gone back to Thailand after a few more months, for she had really done exceptionally well and already had enough money to retire on. But the date of this last conversation was September 10, 2001.
Curiously, it is on this very day that Chanya, feeling depressed and exhausted from their argument, records one of those revelations that come to everyone who spends a long time in a foreign country. On the corner of Pennsylvania and Ninth she is overcome by nostalgia for her homeland. She is experiencing a revolution in attitude.
From the start something very specific has impressed her about Americans, even the humblest: it is the way they walk. Even bag people walk with purpose and energy and with total certainty about the direction they want to go in, which is a lot different to the way Thais walk in Bangkok or Surin, where the need for purpose and direction has not much penetrated the collective mind. Now she has seen quite a lot of the country, and in the process a germ of awareness has slowly grown.
They don't know where they're going, they just know how to look as if they do. They walk like that because they're scared. Some demon is whipping them from inside. Chanya will never walk like that.
For a moment she feels she understands everything about Saharat Amerika; it coincides with a decision to go home to Thailand sooner rather than later. She doesn't want to marry a frightened man who has perfected the art of going nowhere with such zeal and determination. To admit that you are lost seems closer to enlightenment and a lot more honest. More adult, even.
Mitch Turner calls her around three p.m. the next day, when the whole country is in turmoil. He is playing the impeccable, responsible professional, which is the character he uses for work.
"You'll have to get out." He knows, of course, that she is an illegal immigrant, has checked her out on the CIA database, perhaps even checked with his contacts in Thailand. "I don't know where in hell this is going to lead, but you can bet everyone with a foreign passport from anywhere east of Berlin is going to come under scrutiny. They're already talking of arrest without trial. You could get caught up in something that could take away years of your life."
She doesn't need to be told twice. As soon as the airlines are working again, she gets on a plane. She is back in her home village near Surin on the Cambodian border by the twenty-second of that month. The first luxury item she buys is a Sony flat-screen TV, on which the images of 747s crashing into the twin towers are replayed over and over again, no matter the channel.
That's the end of Chanya's diary, farang.
FIVE
Al Qaeda
27
I t's early afternoon by the time I reach Soi Cowboy and open the bar. I'm keen to check with Lek after his evening with Fatima, but first I need to discuss Chanya's diary with Nong.
I wai the Buddha as soon as I've switched the lights on. The important thing, always, is to keep the beer and spirits replenished. Most customers drink Kloster or Singha or Heineken, and the girls of course make half their money through lady drinks, a fact which is never far from my mother's mind. She has left a message telling me to order more Kloster and tequila from the wholesalers as soon a
s I get in. The tequila is not a problem, in the worst case we can always buy a few bottles retail, but the Kloster is dangerously low.
When I look up at the Buddha statue, I finally understand why I'm feeling so edgy. The little guy is fresh out of marigolds. Out in the street I find a flower vendor, from whom I buy as many garlands as I can carry. (Wherever you go in my country there will be a flower vendor, her stall laden with Buddha garlands: it's a sure bet in a land populated by sixty-one million gamblers.) As soon as I've smothered him in flowers, I light a bunch of incense, which my mother keeps under the counter, wai him mindfully three times, and stick the incense in the little sand pit we keep for that purpose and beg him to switch the luck back on. The minute I've finished, my mother Nong arrives with her arms full of marigolds.
"I was so busy yesterday I forgot to feed him," she explains from behind all the flowers. I don't say anything, merely watch while she takes in the garlands I've just hung all over him. "Oh. Well, he'll forgive us now." A beam. "We should be in for some really good luck. How did you get on in Songai Kolok?"
I make a face and tell her to sit down at one of the tables. I tell her about the diary and the all-important fact that Chanya knew Mitch Turner in the United States. Had a passionate affair with him. Nong gets the point immediately. "There could be evidence linking her to him? If the Americans investigate, they'll surely find out he was seeing a Thai girl in Washington. Even though she was traveling on someone else's passport, they might find out who she really is?"
"Exactly."
I gaze up at the Buddha and make a face. How many marigolds will it take before he forgives us for neglecting him? Nong follows the direction of my gaze, goes up to him, lights a bunch of incense, and wais mindfully, with rather more piety than I was able to muster.
"I'm sure you didn't wai him properly," she scolds. "It'll be okay now."
Now "Satisfaction" is playing on my mobile. It's Vikorn, wanting to know how I got on in Songai Kolok. "You better get over here," he tells me, and closes the phone.
The public area of the station is crowded with the usual collection: beggars, whores, monks, wives complaining about their violent husbands, husbands complaining about their thieving, lying wives, lost children, the bewildered, the ruthless, the poor. Everyone here is poor. Vikorn's corridor is empty, though, as is his room apart from him. He listens while I tell him more about Chanya's diary and the CIA men Hudson and Bright who turned up in Songai Kolok. He stands after a while, then walks up and down with his hands in his pockets.
"Look at it this way. You're a brilliant scholar with at least a Ph.D. in something hideously complicated. While still an idealistic student, you decide to serve your country by joining the CIA, which eagerly recruits you. Ten years down the track you are no longer a naIve student. Everyone you knew at college is earning twice your salary and having fun spending money. Men and women who were twenty percent dumber than you in school are now captains of industry, technology billionaires-maybe they've retired already from their first careers. They don't have to worry about what they do and don't say to their wives and families, they don't need to think that the order could come from on high any minute for them to pack their bags and spend four or five years of their lives in some godforsaken dump like Songai Kolok. They don't suffer polygraph tests every six months, random drug tests, electronic eavesdropping. You, on the other hand, are snared in the organization. Promotion is the only hope, the only way out of an incredibly frustrating trap. Now, spying is just the same as soldiering in one respect. What you need is a nice big war to open up the promotion prospects. Since 9/11, there is only one way anyone in the Agency is going to get promotion, and that is by nabbing a few Al Qaeda operatives. Tell me, how did they strike you, those guys you met who were sniffing around Mitch Turner's apartment?"
As usual, my master has effortlessly demonstrated his strategic genius, the superiority of his mind, his encyclopedic grasp of human weakness in all its guises. "The older one, Hudson, was exactly like that," I admit.
"Middle-aged, frustrated, desperate for promotion, sick to death of the tedium of small-scale spying, wondering what the hell he's doing in the third world when he expected to be driving a nice big desk in Washington at this stage in his career, ideologically jaded?"
"Yes." It does not seem appropriate to mention Hudson's extraterrestrial origins at this moment.
"And the other one?"
"Typical socially immature farang male with big ideas and tendency to walk into elephant traps." There seems no need to go into the poor boy's antecedents; people simply do not realize how boring most past lives are. Like so many of our species, Bright has been a herd animal for more than a thousand years, getting himself honorably killed in most of history's great battles. Doubt did not enter his soul until he lay limbless and dying at Da Nang, when he entertained the unthinkable: Had he been misled?
"Hmm." Looking at me brightly: "The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?" He stares at me. I shrug. "It's simply a matter of being careful." He makes that obscene fish-tickling gesture and grins.
When I check on Lek, I find he has called in sick for two days. Nobody knows where he is. When I call Fatima, she doesn't know, either.
"Should we be worried?" I ask her.
"Darling, it was his moment. I had to kick him out of his comfortable little nest. Did he fly or not? There are no rules. If he survives, he'll be back. He can't do without me now."
"You didn't even check on him?"
"Don't be a child, darling."
Chanya in my dreams again last night. An artificial lake of the kind only seen in Rajasthan, a perfect square with a temple apparently floating on a white raft in the center. On shore, a line of forlorn young men. Each pilgrim is ferried out to the island for an interview with a Buddhist monk who resides there. When it is my turn, I find I cannot look into the monk's eyes. My hand holds out a photograph of Chanya. I wake up in a sweat.
The dream has shaken me. I don't think I'd admitted to myself how desperately I wanted her, and now I'm going through that disgusting form of anguish that is so entertaining when it happens to someone else. Having Vikorn make snide references to my emotional life is one thing, but to be outed by the transcendent is quite a different kettle of pla. Even so, I take a good couple of hours before I open my mobile and flick through the names until I reach C.
"Sonchai?" she says in that designed-to-melt tone that makes you want to kill her when she uses it on other men.
"I was just wondering how you were getting on."
"Were you? Did you read my diary?"
A hoarse whisper: "Yes."
"I suppose it's not that interesting, really. I just thought you would want to know the background, in case…"
"Sure. I understand. There are a couple of things, though, maybe we should talk about."
"There are? Like what?"
"Hard to talk over the phone, don't you think?"
"In case we're being listened to? Is it that bad already?"
"Ah, maybe, we just don't know."
"What d'you want to do?"
"Maybe we should have a bite to eat?"
28
F orget it, farang, I'm not telling you what happened at supper. Let's say I made a total needy, clumsy, nerve-racked asshole of myself (there's a reason why love is female in all responsible cosmologies, it turns men into clowns), but the steamed bass with lime was excellent, the cold Australian white out of this world, and my uncompromising kiss smack on the divine lips when we said goodbye better than both. (If she didn't know before that I was gaga, she does now.) I'll leave it at that for the moment, if you don't mind. I'm taking it as a manifestation of cosmic compassion that she's not working anymore. No, of course I didn't tell her about the
dream.
It is about ten in the evening when I return to the Old Man's Club, where my mother has been in charge. She is nowhere to be seen, but many of the customers are wrinkling their noses in judgmental style.
I trace the aroma to the covered area in the yard where Nong is sitting. She does something furtive with her hands when she sees me, but it is too late.
"I thought you were on a diet."
"I am. It includes fruit."
"I'm sure it doesn't just say fruit. I bet it says citrus fruit or something. You were eating apples only a few days ago."
"Fruit is fruit. What's the difference?"
I decide to play this delicate moment artfully and put on a charming smile as I approach. Despite her suspicions, she responds to my affectionate peck on the cheek and is too slow to stop my left hand as it makes a grab for the odiferous yellow splotch on her plate.
"Thieving brat."
I munch cheerfully. Ah, durian, its exquisite melancholy decadence, its haunting viscous sensuality, its naked raw unashamed primeval pungency, its triumphantly morbid allure-oh, never mind, farang, no way you'll understand durian without spending half a lifetime out here.
"It's got to be the most fattening fruit in the world. Whatever farang concocted your diet has probably never even heard of it."
"There's an e-mail," she says, not without a tone of relief. "He's going to be delayed at least another week. Some case he's got to be in the States for."
May Buddha forgive me, I'd forgotten all about Superman. I rush to the PC and check the e-mail.
My dearest Nong and Sonchai, I'm so terribly sorry, but I'm going to be delayed. The Court of Appeals just informed me that they've moved one of my big three cases forward for hearing over the next few days. I'm representing one of the firm's biggest clients and there's just no way I can avoid being here for it. I'm going to come as soon as it's over-and I mean as soon. I'm keeping a bag packed and I'm going straight from the office to the airport the minute the case ends. I'm burning up about you two. My god, Nong… My god (I love you too, Sonchai, even if we've never met).