“But…”
Samart was fussing with his chest wound, attempting to gather the edges of his shirt together to hide the offal.
“But you told me Khun So would be there,” he reminded her. “You said…”
“Sorry.”
“You knew whose house that was.”
She smiled, and her sluggy tongue unfurled to her Adam’s apple.
“But you’re my spirit guide,” he said, his voice several octaves above masculine.
She put her hand on his knee.
“You know?” she said. “I might have exaggerated about my role in your universe just a bit.”
“Then I don’t get it. What are you?”
“Just a regular old malevolent spirit. A nasty ghost with a chip on her shoulder.”
“Against me?”
“Yes.”
“What have I ever done to you?”
“Lottery numbers.”
“What about lottery numbers?”
“You made them up.”
“Of course I made them up.”
He started to laugh and his spleen slipped out onto his lap. He opened the glove box hoping to find something to patch the hole. It was annoying. He ripped the registration sticker off the windshield, but the gum no longer stuck. He threw it down in a rage.
“All this is because I gave you bum lottery numbers?”
“It certainly wasn’t the worst thing you did. You were lying to people for years about serious things. Pretending to talk to relatives on this side. Having the mourning ones hand over their valuables. Giving them false hope. You’ve pissed off a lot of folk, Samart. A lot of lost souls are dying to meet you. We have a little admiration society. We Buddhists may not have a heaven, Teacher Wong, but we have a nice selection of hells. We’re on our way to one I think you’ll enjoy.”
The scene beyond the windows had passed quickly through purple dusk to a mauve-black night. The only lights beside the road came from bushes burning. The car began to slow and figures stepped out from behind the bonfires. It occurred to Samart that whoever researched for the Living Dead movies had done a field trip to purgatory because zombies really did look like that. Some of them made Halfhead seem positively pretty. They laboured painfully toward the car as it rolled to a stop.
“Look,” Samart said, holding back his panic, “I want to lodge an appeal. I get sent to hell because I got the lottery numbers wrong? That’s ridiculous, and it’s not fair. I was just starting to make something of myself.”
“Based on lies, Samart. As always. Do you really think it doesn’t matter? People came to you out of desperation. They wanted help. My husband was a security guard. He got laid off during the recession. He was depressed. He turned to drink. Our poor but happy life was disintegrating. My neighbour told me you had a gift. I came to you and…”
“I know you?”
“You probably don’t remember me. I’ve let myself go a bit since then. I told you about our problem. I gave you a sack of rice and my mother’s ring and you gave me the lottery numbers. I asked if you were sure. You were confident. You said you’d seen the numbers in a dream, but you couldn’t be certain what order they would appear in. I believed in you. I put all the savings I’d hidden away from my husband, sold our fruit handcart, borrowed money from friends and bought every ticket—every combination of those numbers. Every ticket I could find from one side of the city to the other. And the lottery numbers were announced, and not one of your numbers came up. Not one, Samart. Now what are the odds of that? There should be a prize for having no numbers, don’t you think?”
“It’s a gamble. You can’t blame—”
He was interrupted by the clawing of blackened fingernails against the windows. To his horror, Halfhead started to wind down the glass.
“Well, I do,” she said. “You gave me your word and I believed you. My husband was sober when I told him I’d lost all our money. He smiled and walked out. When he came back a few hours later with the machete, he was drunk. I don’t know where he’d found the booze. We had no cash. He’s a strong man. It only took one blow to do this. Impressive, isn’t it? Split down the middle like a coconut. I didn’t feel a thing. Not until I got here. Then the hurt and resentment began.”
“I didn’t…”
“Yes, you did. And you deserve whatever’s coming to you. You’ll have an awful time here, Samart. My job’s done. I’ll eventually move on to somewhere with better décor, but you’ve accrued so much bad debt, you’ll be here for a very long time. You’ll have an age to meet all those spirits you claimed to be talking to when you were back there. And you’d be surprised how many of us gals are still in need of a good invoking from time to time. You’re going to have your work cut out for you, Teacher Wong.”
Icy hands reached in through the window and caressed the petrified shaman, lifted his shirt, pinched at his soft flesh. His eyes were red even without the benefit of makeup. His heart was full and heavy as lard and sliding gradually down to the hole in his front. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he imagined his future. A miserable future without end. And as if all that weren’t bad enough… the beer was crap.
Colin Cotterill
Colin Cotterill was born in London and trained as a teacher and set off on a world tour that didn’t ever come to an end. Colin has taught and trained teachers in Thailand and on the Burmese border. He spent several years in Laos, initially with UNESCO and wrote and produced a forty-program language teaching series; English By Accident, for Thai national television.
All the while, Colin continued with his two other passions; cartooning and writing. He contributed regular columns for the Bangkok Post. It wasn’t until his work with trafficked children that he found himself sufficiently stimulated to put together his first novel, The Night Bastard (Suk’s Editions. 2000). The reaction to that first attempt was so positive that Colin decided to take time off and write full-time.
Since 1990, Colin has been a regular cartoonist for national publications. A Thai language translation of his cartoon scrapbook, Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket and weekly social cartoons in The Nation newspaper. In 2004, an illustrated bilingual column ‘cycle logical’ was launched in Matichon Weekly magazine. Later, both comic strips have been published in book form.
In 2009, Colin Cotterill received the Crime Writers Association Dagger in the Library award for being “the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to library users.”
Dolphins Inc.
Christopher G. Moore
1.0
Where are you?
Queen Sirikit Center, Bangkok, Thailand
Inside one of the smaller conference rooms, the air-conditioning blasting multiple streams over the audience. In the back a youngish Thai man—just out of his teens—his hair short, as if he’d recently disrobed as a monk or left military service. But he didn’t seem like the type for either the monkhood or the army. Chinapat had the soft, nerdy look of a man-boy slumped before a computer screen as a way of life.
He sat in quiet serenity, either meditating or somewhere online inside his skull, slowly rubbing his hands, moving his fingers together as if the meat locker chill temperature had seeped deep into his body or he had lost his concentration, hand on the mouse, the cursor frozen on the screen. Dressed in a suit and tie, and cheap black shoes from the Sunday market, the kind with thick rubber soles. Such shoes allowed Chinapat, like a phantom, silently and without notice, to disappear inside a room.
Inside the frigid room was the object of Chinapat’s first professional job.
A middle-aged Japanese man in dark glasses looked him over the way a father looks over a son, part pride, part doubt and disapproval, as if his expectations had been exceeded and dashed at the same time. The Japanese man showed him a photograph of Tanaka.
“Eliminate him,” he said.
Chinapat glanced at the podium. Mr. Tanaka, a representative of an obscure but well-financed Japanese film distributor, spoke to the early morn
ing symposium. It was Friday at 8:30 a.m. Chinapat couldn’t remember the last time he’d been awake at 8:30 in the morning; no memory came back.
He watched as Mr. Tanaka began to read from his notes, looking up at a thin audience of no more than seventy-five people—a scattering of journalists, film students, some representatives from the Japanese embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a few walk-ins who had read about the event in the Bangkok Post. Most of the audience had blue lips from the cold. They’d been paid a handsome sum to wrap themselves in coats and scarves to survive the arctic blast from the ventilation system. The first two rows of hard-looking Japanese men, with thick necks sticking like redwoods from their white shirts and dark suits, sat so still they looked like sculptures. Chinapat sighed, thinking as he examined the men in the first rows that he’d signed onto a very long payroll.
Mr. Tanaka had a thin moustache and gleaming teeth that looked artificial—hard, resilient objects that would outlive the man by centuries. The speaker appeared more Chinese than Japanese with his round face and large eyes. Chinapat wondered if this was the result of a deep flaw as Tanaka lowered his glasses, looked up from his notes and nodded at one of the men in the first row. Tanaka’s unsmiling stone-like face surveyed the audience. He spoke in English, his tone reserved and serious. Chinapat wondered what it was like to actually kill a man in the real world. And, in particular, what it would feel like to kill Tanaka.
“We resist outsiders who don’t know our history,” Tanaka said, looking at the audience. “Such people do not respect or honor our way of life, our traditions. Our history, like your history in Thailand, is both noble and ancient. Outsiders would try to destroy our culture. We have terrorists like the Sea Shepherd, saying that because we hunt limited numbers of dolphins and pilot whales we are wrong. How can that be?” Tanaka shrugged his shoulders, looking out at his audience. “How can the Japanese way of life be wrong? It’s not logical. It’s not scientific.”
Chinapat thought the speech sounded like something from the lips of an old analogue way of viewing reality. He opened one eye and glanced down at his watch before he closed them again. Waiting was the worst part of his job. Listening to a speech from Tanaka was the second worst part. He quite enjoyed, though, the planning, working out the details—place, time and, most important of all, the exit from the scene once the work was done.
Mr. Tanaka hadn’t made his first job easy. In the real world there were no “cheat codes” to game the system. He had to figure out stuff one step at a time. Tanaka hadn’t stayed in any of the luxury hotels on Sukhumvit Road. Instead he had holed up, as if expecting trouble, in a compound in Thonglor—the heart of the Japanese expat community—ringed with CCTV cameras, security personnel and limited access. On screen, none of these obstacles would have taken more than a few keystrokes to blow through.
Tanaka droned on in a public speech fashion—all words, no images—with lots of very important people in the audience who actually appeared to be listening. Chinapat hated all of those words, and he hated more how the words made him captive, a passive, helpless, patient observer. Analogue boredom flowed like pain throughout the system.
The overhead lights dimmed, and behind him the film started.
The screening of The Taiji Truth ended with a slow fade to a group of fishermen sitting together with their wives and children. The villagers lived in Taiji, located in southwestern Japan. These were the same people who’d done the heavy work, the slicing and cutting, the killing in The Cove. In this film the fishermen appeared as heroes, dressed like samurai. They talked about the history of their village and its simple, honest people, who only wanted to continue the traditions of their ancestors. Self-sufficient, modest, proud and very Japanese… but no one was talking about Academy Awards. The film had been financed by members of the far right in Japan and had been taken to Asian countries to show the true story of the people of Taiji and their relationship with the annual dolphin hunt.
The camera floated across the faces, making them look like humble, salt of the earth villagers who had little in terms of material possessions. The kind of people one rarely thought about as living in Japan. Chinapat thought they looked like men, women and children from a village near the Laotian border he’d once visited just to see what such a place looked like. He was more careful about unstructured visits, as they often led to little more than dust, barking dogs, chickens scratching the ground and the smell of wood fires. Bangkok was different. So was Taiji.
No more than five minutes into the documentary, there was a jump cut. Nothing gracefully prepared the audience for what came next.
A shudder arose as the screen filled with the Taiji bay boiled up a gruesome red. Blood gushed from dozens of gutted dolphins as local Japanese villagers slaughtered as if on a battleground, hacking and stabbing and cutting through the flesh. Tanaka started shouting in Japanese. A couple of the men in the first row ran to the front, using their sizeable bodies to block the screen. Other Japanese men from the second row ran to the projection room in the back. Chinapat heard them cursing in Japanese.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have had someone sabotage our film. Those who hate Japan stop at nothing to hurt us. What you are seeing is an example of the history of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. They seek to interfere and bring down our traditions. We will stand together against such people.”
The Japanese in the audience applauded. After a few seconds they were on their feet giving Tanaka a standing ovation. It was Tanaka’s moment of glory. He actually smiled and bowed to the audience. The men outside the projection room were having difficulty getting in. The projectionist had locked the door from the inside.
“In Japan we follow the principle of sustainable use. Dolphins are a renewable resource.”
Chinapat kept his eye on the stage, watching the sea of dead and dying dolphins dancing over the faces and chests of the Japanese men from the audience who stood shoulder to shoulder, as if they’d practiced this formation. The shallow inland bay reminded him of Fanta strawberry red, one of Chinapat’s favorite drinks as a boy. The rest of the audience reacted with confusion and anger. Watching the men from the first five minutes gleefully slaughtering the dolphins horrified the women in the audience. They registered a common emotion, which exploded like a flock of birds that had spotted an eagle circling. The roaring sound of stale breath sucked deep back into the lungs, a rising tone of disgust salted with despair.
Finally the film stopped, and the men who’d been blocking the screen filed back and took their seats. Three other men came out of the project in booth, leaving a comrade inside to keep an eye on the projectionist.
As Tanaka resumed his speech, apologizing for the interruption and promising to file a complaint, he said, “What you’ve just seen is the work of terrorists.”
More applause burst from a sizeable section of the audience. Chinapat observed that a number of those applauding were missing little fingers. The absent appendage didn’t muffle or reduce the sound of the clapping. Then an attractive young Thai woman with red streaks in her long black hair entered from one of the side doors—she looked no more than seventeen or eighteen. She wore a tight, short black miniskirt and a crisp white cotton blouse with shiny buttons that looked like military decorations. She walked straight to his row and sat in the seat next to him. “I know who you are,” she said. “And I have a message for you.”
He didn’t recognize her at first. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else, younger sister,” he said.
“It’s a trap,” she said, looking straight ahead at the stage. “We’ve been set up.”
“That’s not my reading,” he said.
Her name was Seven and she’d expected an argument. “That’s because your calculations are off point four,” she said.
He ran through the sequence from top to bottom. “Fuck, you’re right,” he said, his mouth ajar. “How did that happen?”
She leaned over and whispered, “You were in a hurry. Now we don’t h
ave much time. But I have a backup plan.”
One of the things Chinapat loved most about Seven was that she always came with a fully developed contingency program.
She firmly grabbed his hand, and together they moved down the row to the exit door and out into the main lobby. Seven handed him a shopping bag and pointed to the men’s restroom. A couple of minutes later, Chinapat emerged wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses, Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt with a small dolphin icon above the heart.
2.0
Where are you?
Nana Entertainment Plaza
In a small, overcrowded back room of a bar converted into an office, a couple of tables, chairs, bookcases, a filing cabinet and two enormous safes occupied the area behind a locked set of teak doors.
Sitting amid gray smoke, a heavy-set MiddleEastern man named Jaul slumped in front of a computer screen. His enormous stomach rose above the edge of the table as his right hand moved the mouse and his left hand fed a large, freshly fried chicken drumstick into his mouth. Jaul was online, working through a pirated version of an early program of an archeological dig outside Baghdad. He was the owner of the Smoke but No Fire Bar.
The bar, once a travel agency, was discreetly set back from the staircase on the second floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza. It was early morning, and the plaza was deserted. A few delivery trucks downstairs. Otherwise only a stray cat and a couple of resident dogs occupied the narrow corridors. Jaul loved the early morning, when he was left alone to count his money. His was a popular bar, and his women tall and young and beautiful. Money, piles of cash, accumulated every night like clockwork. He had counted his money twice and made notes in a ledger. Behind the chair where he sat, the safe door was ajar. Through the door appeared rows of stacked Thai thousand and five hundred baht notes.
One of Seven’s cyber friends had struck up a friendship with Pepsi, who worked at Jaul’s Smoke but No Fire Bar in Nana. Pepsi was a dancer and she took drugs. She paid cash for some cyber work involving several foreign customers, and Seven had been a subcontractor in refining Pepsi’s network of clients. Like most addicts Pepsi had a keen awareness of where lots of money was hidden and loved to gossip. She traded information about Jaul’s safe after Seven promised a full system upgrade and payment security that her bookie couldn’t hack.
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