Bangkok Tattoo sj-2

by John Burdett

  Spokesman: Sorcery carries a heavy karmic price.

  Pisit: Almost every Thai man learns to meditate in his early twenties. How much sorcery do you think we generate in this kingdom? I mean, how many of our most prominent figures in business and politics have got where they are today using dark powers?

  Spokesman: We don't have any statistics.

  Pisit: But if you were to hazard a guess?

  Spokesman: All of them.

  The destination this merry morning is a magnificent mansion off Soi 22, Sukhumvit. Vikorn sits in the kitchen flirting with an attractive Thai woman in her mid-twenties while a corpse waits in the living room. Blood has flooded the capillaries in my Colonel's face, which has acquired an obscene beam. He introduces his companion as Nok, and I can tell by the shape her mouth makes when she speaks to me that they have already fixed an assignation.

  "You better tell him yourself," Vikorn says. With a quite disgusting grin at her: "I don't want to put words in your mouth."

  "I'm the maid here," Nok says, standing up and leading me out of the kitchen. "When I arrived this morning, I found him like that. Naturally I called the police, and Colonel Vikorn himself arrived."

  The middle-aged Japanese male is naked on the polished pine floor in a crimson lake that has spread in a slow flood over sealed wood. Vikorn wanders in while I'm conducting a perfunctory examination of the corpse. The last segment of pinkie is missing from his left hand, a very old wound. I catch Vikorn's eye when I turn him over.

  Vikorn shakes his head. "You'll have to stop this. Do whatever you need to do. Don't arrest him-shoot him while he's trying to escape. This has to stop." A shrug. "At least this victim is not American so we don't have to call the CIA."

  "You're not going to tell them?"

  "I've run out of hairs."

  I turn to Nok: "Please tell me what you know."

  "I came to work here a year ago," Nok explains. "I was recruited by his wife, a Japanese woman with a personality problem. I mean, she never stopped complaining. She was obsessive about the house." A wave of the hand: "This is all her."

  I take a moment to look around. The place could not be more Japanese: sliding screens of translucent paper, a small nonsymmetrical pool in the middle of the room (in which a severed penis floats) surrounded by pebbles, bonsai in beige glazed pots, and carefully wrinkled natural-colored paper on the walls.

  "I had to learn the Japanese names for everything. It took me ages with her bitching at me all the time-the place had to be spotless. Then, just when she had everything perfect, she dumped him and fled back to Japan, said she couldn't stand Thailand, that we were all primitive, dirty, and revolting. Nips are worse racists than we are."

  "When did she go?"

  "About two months ago. It didn't seem to bother him very much. He had whores back here from time to time."

  "Did you sleep with him?"

  Firmly: "No. He asked me to a couple of times, but I said I wasn't like that."

  "If he'd offered something respectable, like the position of mia noi?"

  "Well, he didn't. He just wanted a cheap screw, and he wasn't going to pay any more than he paid for his other women, so I said no."

  "You never saw him naked?"

  "No."

  "Never saw his back without a shirt?"

  "No."

  "Any enemies that you know of?"

  Vikorn stands frowning over the cadaver. "Forget it," he says to me. "This guy was the CEO of the Thai-Nippon Reforestation and Beautification of Isaan Corporation."

  I was bending over the body; now I straighten to stare at him. He shrugs. "Don't ask me, I haven't the faintest idea."

  "Zinna's going to think you're behind this."

  "I know. It's one of those dreadful coincidences." He does not seem overly worried about Zinna. "I don't know what the connection is, really I don't. This has nothing at all to do with me. What does it matter why when we know who?"

  I exchange a nod with Vikorn.

  "The forensic team will be here in a minute. I've got some urgent business on the other side of town," I explain to the maid as I make for the door. Out on the street I take a motorbike taxi back to Chanya. On the way I finally hear my mobile bleep with a text message:

  They've taken her. They want her tattoo.

  45

  O ur love nest echoes with ghosts of love's murmurs. I'm too devastated to move. Rooted to the spot, I experience an expanding vacuum in my chest that makes it difficult to breathe. Images of her likely mutilation flash across my brain. I loved her long before I knew her face or name. I am consciousness trapped in a pipe. Is there any need to explain? I never wanted anything before she illuminated my life. Now I cannot return to that pre-Chanya drabness, that routine of shadows. (Even the Buddha doesn't glow like her.) I fear nothing except her loss. I hardly have the will to look at the new text message on my cell phone: Come alone, bring a million USD in nonsequential notes. Help me save her. The message ends with an address on the other side of town, just off Kaosan Road. I call Vikorn. A million U.S. is an oddly modest sum in the circumstances-he'll send someone over with it immediately. "D'you want a team? We could just blow up the building."

  "Kill her, too?"

  Vikorn grunts. "Have it your way. If you lose the fight, I'm going in with a hit squad, and she'll have to take her chances. Fucking Chiu Chow."

  The money, thrown carelessly into a plastic bag, arrives in the company of a young constable who, from the look on his face, has been suitably terrorized by Vikorn.

  But the roads are blocked with the usual traffic jam, which stretches all the way down Sukhumvit, shutting out even the side sois where traffic cannot enter the main stream. Serenity eludes me. I cannot meditate. I'm another helpless creature, just like all the other creatures, from ants to Einsteins, lashed by karma. By the time we arrive on the other side of town, my nerves are jumping, my eyes darting, the hand holding the money is shaking violently. My brain is full of un-Buddhist images of what I will do to them if they've started to work on her. At the same time, like any amateur I'm attempting to bribe the Buddha. I'm up to three hogs' heads and a thousand eggs by the time we turn into Kaosan Road. As far as I can recall, even birth was less stressful.

  Well, there's nothing like the Buddha when it comes to anticlimax. The house is an old teak structure on stilts in the ancient Thai style. There are still a few left in the Kaosan area, mostly turned into guesthouses for nostalgia-hungry farang. This one has not been well maintained; it looks almost derelict with luscious weeds and other stubborn growths crowding out what must once have been a tropical garden. On the wall next to the front gate is a forlorn sign in Thai, English, and Japanese: TATTOOS. All the windows are shuttered. Parked in the road outside: a large metallic gray BMW with a driver waiting. At my knock the door immediately opens, a well-dressed Chinese man in his early thirties surveys me for a moment and allows his eyes to rest on the plastic bag, then bows slightly as he lets me in. He closes the door carefully behind him and points to the internal door, which leads to the great room that occupies the whole of the first floor.

  For light we are dependent on knife-shaped shafts that penetrate the teak shutters and carve out brilliant elongated forms on the floor and furniture. Some of the light pierces the gloom of the walls, which I now see, with the expansion of my pupils, is chockablock with paintings, geometric designs, and grotesquely enlarged photographs of tattooed bodies both male and female, most of them naked save for the ink. The walls are so extraordinary, they quite eclipse the humans who sit below them. I think Gauguin's hut on Tahiti was like this. Here in this big old space the tattooist has let his imagination run riot. And what an imagination! Influences from the great Hokusai to Hieronymus Bosch to Warhol to Van Gogh to Picasso to graffiti on the Tokyo subway: Ishy's art is as eclectic as a magpie, but somehow, in the great heaping of color and shape, he has managed an appalling coherence. The walls are an extension of his own tattoos: extraordinary, intense, compelling, and ultimately
incomprehensible, the product of a wild genius compelled at risk of madness to say: I am.

  When my eyes drop to the sunken table, I wonder if I have not misunderstood the situation and clumsily stumbled onto a business meeting. Each of the seven Chinese is dressed in a business suit and tie, save for one man in his forties who is perhaps the chief negotiator and sports an open-necked shirt under his cashmere jacket. The floor has been dropped to accommodate legs and feet under the table in the old style, but from the other side of the room it looks like a congregation of dwarfs sitting on the floor around a long teak dining table below walls decorated by a mad god. A long shaft of light illuminates Ishy, who sits at the head in a splendid white linen open-neck shirt that reveals a wedge of his tattoos, with the inevitable bottle of sake in front of him. Chanya, in a silk shawl the color of old gold, sits next to him in near darkness. When I approach, she explains in a grumble: "They gave me an anesthetic. I can't feel my tits." To emphasize the point, she massages them with both hands. Without a word I walk to the head of the table with the plastic bag, which I dump in front of Ishy. Everyone stares at the bag, but no one grabs the money. What have I interrupted here? Finally Ishy clears his throat. I think he must have been drinking heavily, for there is no stutter.

  "Unfortunately, it's no longer as simple as that."

  "A pardonable misunderstanding, no one's fault," the Chinese in the open-necked shirt mutters, flashing me a ghostly smile. "But it will have to be cleared up one way or another."

  Ishy engages my eyes. "It seems the million is in respect of Chanya's tattoo only. They were going to cut it out and cure it. Imagine, a million for just that little dolphin. I could have been rich if I'd had more time."

  "So what's the problem?"

  "They were assuming they could just take the other tattoos to sell on the black market. There's quite a demand for my work now, mostly in Japan among the yakuza, who use them as status symbols-the way Japanese businessmen used to keep Van Goghs in safes and only take them out at bragging time. It's quite depressing for an artist who wants exposure. After all, Van Gogh's financial problems are over."

  "Where are the other tattoos?"

  "Upstairs. The most recent are still being cured. Did you know the process is identical to that for pigskin?"

  "How long has this-ah-trade been going on?"

  "It's a long story. You could say Mitch Turner was the first. I never intended it to get out of hand like this. I didn't really intend to kill anybody except him." He gives a matter-of-fact flick of the hand in Chanya's direction. "I couldn't have her, but I couldn't stand any other man to have her either. You would have been next. But if one is going to kill, why miss the opportunity to make a profit? I've coveted that creamy white flesh of yours since the night we met, especially on your back."

  I had already guessed all this, of course. Standing quite still about six feet from the table, speaking like a man calling across a valley, my voice echoing in the cavernous room, I say: "So why can't they take the other tattoos, cured and uncured?"

  Ishy shakes his head at my obtuseness. "Because I've mortgaged them to the Japs already. The yakuza loan sharks. They're sending a team with a lawyer. Should be here any minute. With the Italian." At my baffled glance: "My dear fellow, you didn't expect a war, did you, in this day and age? I called the Japs with the full agreement of Mr. Chu."

  "That is correct," confirms the Chinese in the open-necked shirt, speaking in a monotone. "We're all part of the global business community. It would be unfortunate if this little contractual matter were to come between us when we have so much trade with our Japanese colleagues. It would be unthinkable for us simply to take the works away, now that we are aware of a possibly prior and more lawful claim. I'm afraid Mr. Ishy is too much of an artist to trouble himself with legal niceties. He has mortgaged everything at least twice." A pained smile. "That is the problem."

  Ishy opens his hands helplessly and makes a guilty face. With sudden eagerness: "D'you want to see them?"

  He leads us up the stairs to a narrow corridor with two doors. The first opens onto a bedroom, the walls of which are covered with tattoo designs of the most intimate-and pornographic-variety. He points to a pale skin curing on a single wooden plank."I figured if I was going to kill people for their hides, I might as well combine it with some form of community service. He was a yakuza thug, basically, very senior though, CEO of that phony corporation that is forcing peasants off their lands in Isaan so they can grow fucking chopsticks. He was the one who ordered the killing of that journalist who was a friend of mine-that butterfly tattoo was one of my best. Actually, this godfather was one of my first customers over here. Of course, he wanted a damned samurai on his back-my people really have a problem with mythology. Samurai were mostly drunken homosexuals with a psychotic streak, but don't say that out loud in Japan. I had to be subtle. Fortunately, he was too stupid to understand the message in his own skin. Not bad, is it?"

  The tattoo on the hide on the board is, as a matter of fact, a triumph of subtle satire. To a cursory glance, the samurai in magnificent armor and helmet on the back of a great black stallion, wielding his voluptuous bow, is the very image of the perfect warrior. Look a little closer, however; with just a few deft strokes, Ishy has made his point: drunk and gay, there's no doubt about it, a bombastic narcissist all dressed up with nowhere to go.

  "May I ask why you had to sever their cocks?"

  Ishy frowns and scratches his head, then jerks a thumb at Chanya. "Her karma. I did it to Mitch Turner in a jealous rage, but after that I realized any man could have her. Any jerk in the street. He only had to pay, right?" Chanya winces and looks at the floor. "I would have castrated the whole city for her. That's love."

  "But the men you castrated were already dead."

  "I said love, not logic. Love is a language of symbols-you should know that."

  "Why did you have to kill people you'd already tattooed? Why not kill anyone on the street, then tattoo them later?"

  He shakes his head gravely. "A recipe for mediocrity. For a start, the ink needs to penetrate far below the surface before you get that quality of color and shade. Secondly, you've failed to understand the market. I'm not just selling tattoos, I'm selling murder at the same time. People want that frisson, the cachet of owning the decorated skin of a murdered man, the very skin he wore in life, before he was cut down like a tree for the purpose of art. It's the civilized equivalent of collecting shrunken heads." A swig from the sake bottle he brought with him: "I'm also selling notoriety, of course. When this gets out, the prices of my work will increase a hundredfold." Thoughtfully: "What is murder but suicide by an extrovert? We are all part of the human family after all, and only murderers experience the unbearable passion of true love."

  The man in the open-necked shirt nods in agreement.

  The room next door contains only two wall hangings, both covered in silk cloth. Ishy uncovers the first. "A sad case, that young CIA spy. It was what he wanted-he was quite pleased with it. I guess it was all he expected from life, but he ended up with a Thai whore instead." The tattoo is deeply sad for anyone who knew Stephen Bright: a young woman, a Caucasian with long blond hair, cradling an infant in the tradition of Madonna and child. The sheer simplicity of the lines (perhaps Ishy was making a point, for it is a touch too simple) makes it all the more poignant.

  "It's brilliant," I find myself saying with a gulp.

  "But it's not as good as this," Ishy declares as he pulls the cover off the second, larger work. Chanya gasps at the sight of a familiar image in an unfamiliar situation. I also gasp, as does the man in the open-necked shirt. Even his thugs are impressed. "Mitch Turner," Ishy explains. "It was his idea, something he got from a book or an opium dream, or some spell he was under. Of course, I insisted on my own interpretation."

  But for once Ishy has maintained a fierce discipline, which is a big part of the magic. An amazingly dense and virile green vine fills the whole of the tattoo with such vividness, it seem
s to grow up the wall on which it hangs. The rose blossoms themselves are downplayed, hardly more than crimson afterthoughts, highlighting the leaves, each of which, even the tiniest, bears the legend in blood: There is no god but God, Muhammad is the prophet of God.

  Chanya bursts into hysterical sobs as we hear a polite knock on the front door.

  46

  W e have all returned to the great downstairs room. Hours have passed. The man in the open-necked shirt speaks fluent Japanese, and the negotiations have been continuing in that language with the newcomers, a somewhat muscular band of Japanese men in black business suits, all of whom have at least one pinkie missing. They are lined up against one wall, while the Chiu Chow thugs are lined up against another, each warrior perpetually marking his opposite number, while Chanya and I sit on cushions on the floor. Ishy, the chief Japanese negotiator, and the man in the open-necked shirt sit drinking sake at the long table. Quite drunk now, Ishy has undone most of his shirt, perhaps intentionally displaying his hero Admiral Yamamoto, who stares sternly out between the linen folds. The Italian, a slim, gaunt fellow with a mass of curly dark hair, wears a black short-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans, slippers without socks. He squats in a corner of the room with his back against the wall. Ishy has explained, not without some disdain, that he is an art restorer, flown in from Rome. The Japanese, it seems, are taking no chances. (He can peel a micron of paint off a five-hundred-year-old masterpiece, Ishy reported.) It seems that at least one of the Japanese thugs is also a surgeon. In the circumstances, Ishy's good humor is inexplicable. He grows more cheerful by the minute. Finally there is a pause in the intense discussions.

  "They've decided the main point," Ishy calls out to me. "It's only details they're discussing now. Copyright, merchandising, that kind of thing."

  Simultaneously Chanya, who has understood more than I have been able to, from some Japanese she picked up in the course of trade, has collapsed in another great torrent of sobs, taking frequent moments to stare disbelievingly at Ishy, her eyes great saucers of horror and disbelief. When both the Italian and the Japanese surgeon make toward us, she clasps her breasts possessively.