by Yigal Zur
If everything going through my head was documented in Major Somnuk’s file, I thought, he had one hell of a story in his hands. The media would have a field day with it.
“What he tell you yesterday?” Somnuk asked me.
I gave him a questioning look.
“We have him under surveillance ever since we find out he had homosexual relations with Israeli that got killed,” he explained.
“Isn’t that against international law? He had diplomatic immunity.”
The sound he emitted reminded me of a happy pig in mud. I wondered if they learned to grunt like that in Thailand’s police academy.
“You friend of Khon Tom,” he said. “You know better.”
It was the first time he had treated me with any respect or related to my connection to a high-ranking police officer, my old friend Tom. He was right, and I knew it. But I also wondered why he had decided to mention Tom’s name. Nothing happens in Bangkok without a reason.
With Shmulik’s body in front of me, I didn’t even want to consider the possibility that Tom was involved too. Could that be why he introduced me to Gai? So he could watch me from afar? Was it possible that he wasn’t concerned for my safety, but for his own need for information? Was he keeping an eye on me in the hope I would lead him to Sigal? It seemed that everyone was caught in the web of her disappearance, a web whose dimensions I was just starting to grasp.
“You think he killed Micha Waxman?” I asked.
After photographing the scene from every angle, the crime-scene techs finally lowered Shmulik’s body.
Looking me in the eye, Major Somnuk said, “Maybe. But I not think he do it himself. I think he the reason he get killed.”
“Your only witness said he saw a big fat guy leaving the bar,” I said.
“Yes, but then we interrogate him. After an hour, he say different. He not see anything. They tell him to say he see. You know Bangkok. You can buy anything with thousand bahts and one threat.”
I looked up at the concrete ceiling beam, the only witness to the suicide. There was no sign that anything had happened here. Not even a scratch. You would have liked to leave a mark behind, wouldn’t you, Shmulik? But we don’t leave anything behind after we’re gone. Nothing at all.
“You two close?” Major Somnuk asked.
“We used to be,” I said cynically, “in another life.”
That brought a genuine laugh revealing a full set of white teeth. I was afraid he was about to give me a hearty slap on the back.
“You start to understand, falang,” he said. “That biggest compliment I ever give falang. Come. We leaving.”
I didn’t have any reason to stay there, and besides, you don’t say no to a law enforcement agent in a foreign country. It’s not good for the health. Ask any backpacker who ever pissed on a Mexican beach, sold posters in Japan, or did a little drug deal in India without greasing the palms of the local cops.
He took me to a small restaurant by the river where we cracked lobsters in curry sauce, slurped fresh oysters with lemon, and chomped on huge shrimp in garlic. I was beginning to think Major Somnuk and I had more in common than I had imagined. The more Mekhong whiskey was poured into the tall glasses and the less it was diluted with soda water, the closer I felt to the corrupt bastard. Closer, in fact, than I felt to anyone else around me. But I don’t want to get carried away. It’s not as if I were starting to like him.
“We toast our friend?” he asked. Somehow, he managed to be drunk and sober at the same time. “Now he empty, bare, open like sky. Now he scared, not know what to do, because he not ready for this moment. Western culture fucked up. No thinking about death. Just afraid. Here death is like change clothes.”
What could I say? I’ve come face-to-face with death more than once, and I always pushed it out of my mind. I always escaped it, too.
If I’m not mistaken, at the end of the night, I hugged Somnuk, or maybe he hugged me. I can’t be positive. What I do remember clearly, however, is sitting on the cool leather seat in his Mercedes and drinking from its well-stocked bar as we drove back to my hotel. I also remember that when I got out of the car with the driver, who kindly helped me to my room, I heard the major laugh. But I’m not sure what he was laughing at. Maybe at me. Or maybe at all the stupid falangs who stream into Bangkok thinking they’ve arrived in paradise and don’t understand the trouble they’re in for. If not right away, then at some point in the near future. Their time will come.
Because that’s another name for Bangkok: Trouble in Paradise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I WOKE UP the next morning with an excruciating headache. It felt as if my brain were on fire. It was more than a hangover; it was the end of the world. Dozens of hammers were banging in my head, and even the slightest movement made them turn the volume up. I teetered to the shower and stood under the cold water for a few minutes. Then I wet a towel, hung it around my neck, and went back into the room where I fell onto the bed. I lay there without moving, trying merely to breathe, no more. It seemed like a huge achievement at the time. Thoughts weren’t just racing through my head, they were flying through it, and not as the crow flies either. They swooped about dizzyingly as if they were at a theme park, going up on a roller coaster and then plummeting downward at terrifying speed, going round and round and round on a Ferris wheel. Within this mad rush, one thought kept re-emerging, nagging at me: Someone has been playing me the whole time.
I called Shai, my partner, back in Tel-Aviv. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How’s everything there?”
“What’s up?” he answered with a question.
“Other than the fact that my head’s on fire?”
He didn’t respond immediately, probably wondering why I chose to begin with that information. Finally, he said, “I was thinking it’s about time you reported in. I haven’t heard a word from you.”
I remembered the early days, when we had just decided to open the agency together, S.D. International Investigations. The number of Israeli kids backpacking in the East and South America was growing, along with the number of those who blew their minds with drugs. Suddenly, they cut off all contact with home, went missing, disappeared. Their parents were worried that something had happened to them. “Let’s hope this is just the beginning,” we said when the first calls from frantic parents began coming in.
The hammers kept banging in my head. I didn’t have the patience to play games. “Shai,” I said, “I need to know how we got involved in this case.”
The silence on the other end didn’t last long, but my brain was on such high alert that I thought I could hear the wheels turning in his head.
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s simple,” I answered. “I have to know if you’re playing me, too.”
“I’m not,” he said quietly, coldly. His tone was even colder than the towel I was now pressing to my forehead.
“Who called you about Sigal?”
“Her father, Albert Bardon. But …” he said, and didn’t go on.
“But what?”
“Listen for yourself.”
Lawsuits aren’t uncommon in our business. People don’t like to lose their loved ones, and when it happens, and sometimes it does, they blame everyone except for the object of the search who made the fatal mistake that cost them their life. Your son is strung out on drugs, goes tubing on the Indus River in a racing current and gets lost in the rapids? That’s okay. But not finding his body is unforgiveable. That’s what they paid you for, after all. So what if they’ve never seen a river rushing down from the Himalayas at the height of the monsoon season, uprooting rocks and tree trunks as if they were as light as feathers? So everything was documented and recorded for our own protection. It’s normal procedure in our profession.
There was a pause while Shai searched for the recording of the call on the computer. I heard the familiar squeaks as he adjusted the sound and held the telephone up to the speaker so I could hear.
The dirty laundry is starting to show, I thought. Shmulik, Reuven—quite a party.
“Did you talk to Reuven?” I asked after Shai had stopped the recording.
“Yes,” he admitted, without further explanation.
“And you didn’t tell me?” The hammers were still going strong.
“No.”
“You didn’t tell me,” I said, repeating furiously. “You didn’t tell me!”
“I knew how you’d react to the mere mention of his name,” he said. “I thought it would be better if I didn’t say anything.”
“You know what he’s like,” I said. The hammers had given way to a giant wrecking ball that was threatening to crush my head. “You know him just as well as I do. You know how he operates. He never does anything innocently. He always has an ulterior motive. And you still didn’t tell me.”
Shai kept silent.
“We’re not like him,” I said. “You saw what he was like when they kicked him out of the agency. He didn’t bend an inch. So how could you, of all people, put me in a situation like this? You’re my partner. You’re the one person in the world I should be able to count on. You know how things ended between us.”
Shai still didn’t respond.
I told him that Shmulik had committed suicide. And how. Along with all the rest I’d found out about him. In revolting detail. But just the facts, no comment. He was in shock. I knew at that moment that our partnership was over. The betrayal of trust could never be healed.
“I’m having a hard time understanding what was going through your head,” I said.
He took his time before answering, and finally said honestly, “What went through my head is that maybe this is more than a coincidence. Maybe Reuven is taking advantage of the opportunity to send you a message.”
Now we were both silent. It was as though we were digging up everything we had buried: all the ghosts of our shared past that we had shoved into the darkest corners of our souls in the hope that we’d get through the rest of our lives without ever having to face them again. I realized that since that period in my life I’d been traveling in circles, circles that closed in on themselves and ultimately brought me to the very place I never wanted to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I CALLED THE number Barbu had given me. I’d been avoiding it, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. An effeminate male voice answered: “Sawadee khrup, Reuven Enterprises Incorporated.”
“Can I speak to Reuven, please?”
“Reuven not here. Who calling?”
“An old friend,” I said.
“Oh, from Israel?”
I was about to say something nasty when I decided to give it another minute or two to find out what I needed to know. “When will he be back?”
“He come. Be here soon.”
“When?” I asked, knowing that time could have a virtual dimension in the East.
“Soon,” he repeated. “Maybe hour. I not know.”
I was starting to wonder what kind of operation Reuven was running and what exactly Reuven Enterprises did. I took down the address he gave me: Jasmine Hotel, Nana district.
Nana is where they sent American soldiers in the Vietnam War for R & R. But instead of rest and recuperation, they went for I & I, intercourse and intoxication. Bangkok was the ideal location, not far and relatively cheap, allowing them to engage in their chosen activities for a few hours more before they were flown back to Vietnam, perhaps never to return.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the Jasmine Hotel attracted beatniks, hippies, and other misfits who shunned the establishment. They’d sit around the pool with giggling local girls, snorting, shooting up, and making fun of the DEA agents. Everyone knew who they were. Almost every day, a chambermaid would find a foreigner dead from an overdose in one of the rooms. Back then, people indulged freely in drugs and were indifferent to death. It was before the AIDS era. If they got gonorrhea, they stood in line for a shot of penicillin that made their butt numb for a day, and then went on fucking. Sometimes they didn’t even wait a day.
Nowadays, Nana attracts Arabs from the Gulf States, some in galabias and others in Western garb and a baseball cap they bought in the market for a buck. They prefer the fat whores, the ones with a lot of flesh on their bones.
As I walked to the hotel, I thought of Mona Lisa. Not Leonardo’s, but the fortune teller who goes by that name. She frequents the side streets, accosting foreigners and persuading them to let her read their palm. To my mind, she’s like a search dog—you let it sniff an object that belonged to the person you’re looking for and it follows a scent that only it can smell. In the course of my investigations, I’ve often made use of people like her, psychics, clairvoyants, and mediums of different varieties. Most of them were nutcases and what they called information was babble, but every now and then, they offer me a new, unexpected perspective. Their minds are attuned to different thought waves than ours and they observe a broader spectrum. But broader often means lack of clarity as well. Nevertheless, in my current circumstances, with no sounding board, no one with whom I could talk things through, share information, or brainstorm, Mona Lisa seemed the most realistic option. I figured I had nothing to lose. I might as well hear what she had to say.
I asked one of the young stall holders where I could find her, and he sent me to Surya, a half-open alleyway where all the local whores get their manicures, pedicures, and foot rubs. They go there after long hours standing on a street corner or wiggling their asses on a go-go stage. They sit down, place their feet in a small plastic basin of hot scented water, and then their toes are wrapped in steaming hot towels, and they’re given a manicure and pedicure that elicit groans of pleasure. They bring their clients along, too. While they’re being pampered, the ubiquitous peddlers have time to show off the latest-model cellphones they carry in plastic attaché cases. If a girl is lucky, her new boyfriend will buy her a present.
Mona Lisa was sitting at the end of a row of wooden stools set out by the manicurists. It was hard to believe that thirty years ago she’d been one of Bangkok’s outstanding beauties. It was well known that this petite whore was different from the others—she liked to fuck. Not surprisingly, there was an enormous demand for her services, and consequently, she burned out quickly. Then came years of drugs, emaciation, decline. But while her body grew steadily thinner, her oval face maintained its sweetness and continued to be framed by long black hair, parted in the middle. Someone once dubbed her Mona Lisa, and it stuck.
How did she become a fortune teller? Nobody knows. It’s said that one day she sat down under a big ficus tree in Lumpini Park and didn’t budge for a year. She just sat there, gazing at the Sodom and Gomorrah that is Bangkok. She saw the young men who arrived fresh and full of life and then lost themselves to drugs, the naïve girls waiting for a falang who would be their guardian angel and take them away from the brothels. She saw it all, absorbed the pain, and her brain ceased all other activity. For a whole year she sat by herself under the tree and watched. People on their way from Lumpini Park to Silom Street would pass her and say, “Mona Lisa sees things.” At least, that’s the story.
Now she was sitting on a bamboo stool, a small skinny woman with a wrinkled face. Her eyes were closed and her hands were resting motionless on her inner thighs. There were two more stools in front of her. One held a blue plastic basin like the ones the ladies soaked their feet in. But Mo
na Lisa’s basin was dry. Inside was a fifty-baht note and a few coins.
“Mona Lisa,” I said.
She raised her tired face, but when she opened her eyes, I could see they still had the same enigmatic expression that Leonardo had captured with his brush. I imagined the bastard must have looked at a lot of whores in his day. Florence back then must have been like Bangkok today, a place where the air was filled with the stench of lust, intercourse, and semen mixed with cooking odors emanating from hot chili and fish oil.
She had a distant look in her eyes, as if they were focused on some faraway place.
“I need your help,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if she saw me or heard me. I put a hundred-baht note in her basin, but even that didn’t draw a response. I fished out a thousand-baht note and passed it in front of her face. She started to come awake. Her eyes followed the bill through the air and watched as I placed it on top of the first.
I took out Sigal’s passport. It had been in my pocket all this time. I hadn’t even showed it to Reut, hadn’t even told her I had it. I kept it hidden, as if it held the key to whatever had happened to Sigal. I opened it to the photo and held it up in front of Mona Lisa’s eyes.
“I’m looking for her,” I said.
She took the passport from me, placed it on her bony knees with the picture facing upward, and lay her open palms on top of it.
“I know she’s alive,” I said.
She closed her eyes again. I thought she might have fallen asleep, but then she opened them abruptly.
“She is very afraid,” she said. “Very much fear. And she is hiding.”
“Where?”
Mona Lisa didn’t answer immediately. She toured her inner consciousness first, and when she returned, she said, “In the beginning I see the smile of Buddha and big fish swimming around him and she is safe. Now …” She fell silent.
“That much I know,” I said impatiently. It wasn’t bad, the way she described the temple. But Sigal wasn’t there anymore.