Bangkok Tattoo sj-2

by John Burdett

  I pull off the headphones as we near the station. There was something in Vikorn's tone when he told me about this meeting last night. Apparently yet another CIA has arrived, supposedly to kick ass. The alleged Al Qaeda connection has got Langley salivating. Things are not looking so good today.

  She is tall, close to six feet, slim with a military bearing, a fit and handsome fortysomething, although her face and neck suffer from that drawn quality characteristic of those beset by the vice of jogging. Her hair is very short, gray and spiky: I wonder if she and Hudson share a barber? She does not waste time or money on cosmetics; her hygienic odor includes carbolic references. The suit is iron gray with baggy pants. We are in Vikorn's office, but it might as well be hers.

  Vikorn, diminished, has let her take over, at least for now. A woman was the last thing he expected. (But I think he's working on a plan.) She keeps her hands in her trouser pockets, thoughtfully pacing up and down as she talks. There is about her the restrained superiority of a senior librarian with access to secret catalogs. Hudson sits uncomfortably, perhaps even resentfully. Bright has not been invited. Nobody interrupts. I translate for Vikorn in a whisper, so as not to disturb her concentration. She has been trained to smile frequently-and inexplicably-perhaps on the same course where she learned unarmed combat?

  "This is serious intelligence. Detective, I want to thank you and your Colonel for bringing this evidence to us. This is a new direction for Al Qaeda, and a surprising one. We've never seen a castration theme before, but it makes a lot of sense from their point of view." She pauses, frowns fussily, continues. "And of course there might be a revenge theme from the Abu Ghraib fiasco. How does the world perceive America, especially the Muslim developing world? As some kind of Superman caricature-with emphasis on man-an overmasculine society obsessed with its power and virility. If they start cutting off our male organs, it will send one of those crude, potent messages that the young, ignorant, and fanatical tend to embrace. Actually, exactly the same technique of intimidation was used by the Ching emperors, who invariably cut off the testicles of prisoners of war, which certainly wore down the enemy's morale. It's smart. Very smart. We cannot let it go unanswered."

  Hudson grunts. She pauses, leans her butt against a wall, and gives Hudson a cool but collegial nod before turning to me. "Did that all get translated? Am I going too fast? I'm sorry I don't speak Thai. Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Russian are my only foreign languages."

  I pass the question on to Vikorn, who looks her in the eye for the first time, then turns to me. "Ask her where she is on the U.S. Army pay scale."

  She allows a quick, patronizing smile at this typical third-world question. "Tell your Colonel I'm not in the army."

  "I know she's not in the fucking army," Vikorn retorts. "They're paid on the same scale. What is her equivalent rank? That's what they never stopped talking about in Laos. Has she gotten above the warrant officer grades? Is she on the O scale or not?"

  She flicks a glacial glance at Hudson. "It's quicker to just answer the question," Hudson advises, staring at the floor.

  "It doesn't work like that anymore," she explains to me. Slowing her speech and with still more careful deliberation: "Your Colonel is referring to thirty years ago, when the Agency was running a secret war, so the pay scale was roughly equivalent to the military pay scale. Nowadays we tend to be paid according to the Federal Government General Schedule."

  "Okay, the GS," Vikorn says, fishing in his desk drawer. "The military scale is based on that anyway. What grade is she?" He takes a sheet of paper out and studies it.

  She absorbs this covert attack effortlessly, as a professional boxer might absorb a punch from an amateur, and raises her eyebrows to Hudson as the man on the ground who understands the local peasants.

  "He didn't like the way you were walking up and down his office. He's checking that you understand the rules of trade. Best give him what he wants."

  "I see," she says with a decisive nod. To me: "You can tell him I'm Grade Eleven if that will help."

  I translate. Vikorn checks with his sheet of paper. "What Step?"

  "Grade Eleven Step One." Horizontal wrinkles appear in her upper forehead while he traces her position on the scale with his fingers. "But the GS can be misleading," she adds, taking control by appearing to help, in accordance with the manual. "You get extras for locality, risk, that kind of thing."

  Vikorn raises his eyebrows at Hudson. "Grade Eight Step Ten," Hudson confesses.

  "So she starts at a base of $42,976 before locality, while he starts at $41,808. There's hardly any difference." Vikorn is beaming.

  When I translate, she shakes her head, then closes her eyes to enforce patience. In a somnambulant voice (the subject may be close to her heart despite its spectacular irrelevance): "There's a drive to change the whole package, make it more result-oriented, more competitive, more like the private sector."

  "There's a lot of resistance to the proposed changes though," says Hudson. "The BENS report is not so popular."

  "You read it cover to cover?"

  "Yeah, there are some practical challenges, like how do you measure results in the intelligence community? The greatest successes are things that didn't go wrong. How do you give credit for that?"

  She shakes her head. "It's a problem."

  "You see," Vikorn says when I've translated, "nothing has changed. They were moaning about the same stuff in Laos, until they learned how to make deals with the Kuomintang and the Hmong. They only took a ten percent cut for transporting the dope, though, in their Air America transport planes, which the Hmong thought was terrific considering what the Chiu Chow Chinese and the Vietnamese and the French used to take. It was the increase in revenue thanks to the CIA that enabled the Hmong to go on fighting for as long as they did. That was one of the most successful CIA operations. Capitalism at its best. Actually, the only successful operation in that theater." I translate.

  She smiles with glacial grace. "Let's take the excesses of Laos as read. I'd like to get back to the matter in hand. Does the Colonel have any questions about that?"

  "Ask her if Mitch Turner was the deceased's real name."

  After a pause: "It was one of them."

  Vikorn smiles and nods. "Now ask her who he was."

  Slowly, deliberately, politely: "Classified."

  Vikorn nods again. Inexplicable silence. She turns to Hudson.

  "People can be subtle in this part of the world," Hudson explains. "He has just pointed out that in his scheme of things, which you might call feudal capitalism or realpolitik depending on your point of view, we are both underpaid slaves whom he could buy twenty times over without noticing, who are engaged in an investigation into the death of someone who probably entered the country on a false name and who, for the purposes of police investigation, may not even have existed. In other words, we may not have a lot of leverage."

  I have to admire her lightning adaptation to the situation on the ground: she finds a chair, pulls it up to Vikorn's desk, and sits on it. Leaning forward with a half-smile: "Mitch Turner was one of the names used by a nonofficial cover operator, a NOC, who was based in the south of this country who was murdered in a hotel room and who was somehow found by the detective here. I never met him myself." A glance at Hudson.

  "Me, either. He was too new. They threw him at me while I was stateside. I was supposed to meet him for the first time the week he died."

  "From what I've been able to understand, he was a brilliant officer, maybe too brilliant. There are remarks in his file to suggest he would have been better used in research. He had zero resistance to alcohol, which could be a security risk, and a tendency to confuse his cover stories. I've been sent over here not because he was murdered but because of the Al Qaeda connection, which your Colonel so effectively demonstrated with those fingers and black hairs."

  "He confused his cover stories? I didn't know that." From Hudson.

  "I'm afraid so." To me, as if I matter (but at least I spe
ak English): "It's an occupational hazard, especially for people with a precarious sense of identity. You stay under cover long enough, you become the cover. There are some research papers on it. Sometimes a previous cover intrudes into the present cover-after all, identity is just a repetition of cultural triggers. He also had a dysfunctional personal life, but so does every NOC. They crave intimacy, but how can one have intimacy when one is a state secret? Some of the sacrifices we require are too much for our less stable officers. And then he had an intermittent religious streak, which didn't help. I am told we took him on because of his Japanese and his high IQ, but he wasn't going anywhere in the Agency. He was seen as a potential liability and a candidate for early retirement. The kindest thing to say is that his mind was too broad, he was an intellectual, a born liberal, he probably joined us as part of his romantic search for self. Speaking off the record, his death at the hands of Al Qaeda is more important than he was. Can we get back to that now?"

  "Of course," Vikorn says with a patronizing smile.

  The CIA woman-she told me her name is Elizabeth Hatch, but who knows?-nods a thank you. "Al Qaeda killed Mitch Turner because they knew what he was, but we don't have any record of him contacting them. His few attempts at recruiting down there seem to have been futile. Are we looking at a kidnapping or a recruitment attempt that went wrong? Or are we looking at a sincere attempt to join them, which they didn't believe in? We were eavesdropping on his communications. He was going through a personal crisis. We need to know what he was thinking, what his true intentions were, minute to minute. You're the only one we have who might be able to help. And there's this."

  With marvelous cool she takes a photograph out of her pocket to show to me. I jump, show it to Vikorn, who also jumps. It is Mitch Turner's corpse, taken after they turned him over, clearly showing the bloody mass of skinless flesh where someone flayed him.

  She's played her trump card with considerable finesse, without a touch of triumphalism. In a level, glacial tone: "Don't ask me how I obtained it, and I won't ask you why you suppressed it." She looks at the pic curiously. "I don't know why you did that, exactly. It does rather complicate the whole thing doesn't it?" Nodding at me. "Perhaps that will do for now. You are our man in the field, I think you'll be wanting to go south again soon. Would a written report be feasible this time? If your Colonel doesn't mind, I would like you to report to me directly."

  "Do I have to do this?" I ask Vikorn.

  He nods reluctantly. "It's a deal. They've promised to leave Chanya alone, so long as we play ball."

  That night, before going to bed, I smoke a big fat spliff, kneel before the Buddha image that I keep on a shelf in my hovel, and form an intention to contact my dead soul brother Pichai. Everyone's personal rituals are hedged about with idiosyncrasies and customized talismans, which I won't go into. Casting aside all padding, my appeal to Pichai's superior forensic insight could be translated: Where the fuck do I go from here?

  Sure enough, that night he comes to me exuding his usual golden glow. We stand together on a high mountain over which clouds are passing at amazing speed. There is a cosmic roar in the background caused by the intense energy of this location. Pichai points to a cloud formation, which immediately takes on the crescent shape of a gigantic beaked fish leaping over a wave. Pichai is urgently trying to tell me something, but his voice is drowned by the roar of the universe…

  Next morning I make Chanya stand before me in one of our upstairs humping rooms, stripped to the waist. I do not resist the temptation to handle her left breast, over which that particularly elegant dolphin continuously jumps.

  "Where did you get it?"

  She shakes her head petulantly. "I'm not telling you."

  I rub her nipple between thumb and forefinger as if it were money, causing it to swell under the dolphin. "The workmanship is fantastic."

  She pushes me away. "Get lost."

  "If I don't find out who really killed Mitch Turner, those morons will start another war."

  "I said get lost."

  Well, maybe it wasn't Chanya's dolphin Pichai had in mind. Maybe it wasn't a dolphin at all, but it's the only lead I've got.

  SIX

  Tattoo

  33

  B ored with Pisit today, I switch to our public radio channel, where the renowned and deeply reverend Phra Titapika is lecturing on Dependent Origination. Not everyone's cup of chocolate, I agree (this is not the most popular show in Thailand), but the doctrine is at the heart of Buddhism. You see, dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot's war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of hubris, it is also proof (if any were needed) that we are above all a delusional species. (We are in a trance from birth to death.) Prick the balloon, and what do you get? Emptiness. It's not only us-this radical doctrine applies to the whole of the sentient world. In a bumper sticker: The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go. Here's the good Phra in fine fettle today: "Take a snail, for example. Consider what brooding overweening self-centered passion got it into that state. Can you see the rage of a snail? The frustration of a cockroach? The ego of an ant? If you can, then you are close to enlightenment."

  Like I say, not everyone's cup of miso. Come to think of it, I do believe I prefer Pisit, but the Phra does have a point: take two steps in the divine art of Buddhist meditation, and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very bones of your being turn out to be no more than bugs in your software. (Even the certainty of death gets nuanced.) You'll find no meaning there. So where? Ah!

  Back to the case.

  Where does a smart man hide a leaf? the great Sherlock Holmes once asked. In a forest, of course. Where does a smart detective start looking for a talented tattooist with the eye of a Zen watercolorist? Not in Songai Kolok, that's for sure. Soi 39, Sukhumvit might be a better bet. The clubs are all Japanese. Since we still enjoy freedom of speech over here, the notices on the door make explicit the management policy of not allowing entry to non-Japanese. I dress up in my Sunday best (it is nine-thirty on a Friday night) and stroll down the street until I come to an elaborate Buddha shrine bedecked with marigolds. I raise my hands in a wai and silently ask for guidance.

  Trying for maximum emptiness, I stroll up and down the street a few times, then, guided by nothing at all (always the most reliable source), knock on a scarlet front door. A hatch opens, an overdressed Thai mamasan scowls, and I explain why it is in her and her boss's interest to let me in. She tends to agree.

  Within minutes I am in one of those hybrid sets so beloved of the pornography industry: dungeon from de Sade, papier-mache rock formations (with plastic chains) from Disney, costumes from Geisha (let me be frank, our girls don't wear them that well-they tend to resent the restrictions), whores from Isaan. I am led discreetly to the back of the club, where I discreetly observe the various states of passionate undress of both customers and girls on the benches all around.

  The girl chained to the papier-mache rock (a dragon lurks in a hole nearby) is quite naked and trying not to look bored while they whip her and drop hot wax onto her breasts. She smiles at me with a face serenely incapable of debauchery (she will sell mangoes from a market stall tomorrow with exactly the same ha
ppy smile) and with her eyes asks if I want her. I am about to signal no when I notice the serpent coiled around her navel. The club is gloomy, too gloomy to examine a work of such quality. Confident that I am not the first to make the request, I call for illumination. The mamasan obliges with a flashlight (Hitachi, rechargeable battery). Up close and without the need for a magnifying glass, I confirm my deepest forensic suspicions: this is a very superior snake: emerald green scales of variegated shades, an ink-blue forked tongue ravishing her belly button, brilliantly designed wings. (Not the huge clumsy things you see Saint George grappling with, but the delicate, diaphanous propellants of Oriental myth: I know I'm on to something here.) I demand that the damsel be released from her bonds immediately.

  Once I confirm that I am willing to pay, the girl, whose name is Dao, slips out of her chains without need for assistance. She recognizes no social imperative to put any clothes on, so now she and I are sitting on a padded bench at the far end of the club, situated not far from other benches with other bodies in perpetual motion. The mamasan would clearly be happier if I conducted my interrogation while at least going through the motions of seduction, and Dao rescues me from professional restraints by taking my right hand and cupping it over her left breast, where I gently pull off the wax flakes. She checks my cock to see if her body is having the usual commercially desirable effect on my body (no comment), while I whisper my question lyrically into her right ear: Where in Thailand did she get such a marvelous tattoo?

  She smiles gratefully, as if I have complimented her on a new dress, and reveals there is another. Kneeling on the bench and turning her back to me, I see that a couple of dragons (lightly done with considerable humor, hardly more substantial than clouds, masterpieces of the body artist's craft-if I were to have dragons competing for my private parts, I would certainly choose these) are fighting for possession of the dark prize. "Fantastic," I confirm as she happily straddles me and places my left hand directly on her vagina, which she informs me, in case I hadn't noticed, is quite wet.