“I see,” Joe said. All he could see was a classroom full of drooling schoolboys. “Tell me about the deceased.”
“Wait. Where are you from?” She asked.
“All over,” he told her. “I’m too uncouth to be considered European and the Asians won’t have me. I grew up on a diet of American books and cinema. I’m international. My mother was a Gypsy and my father was a Jew.”
“What does that make you?”
“A tight-fisted, thieving bastard, with a sense of humour. Tell me about the girl.”
“I’m sorry about your parents.”
“It was a long time ago. Spill.”
“She was one of my students. Did you see the news bulletin?”
“I don’t watch the news. Tell me about it. She was found swinging? Sounds legit to me. Lots of folks do the dance here. Difficult for someone to set up a hanging and frankly, pointless in this country. You could shove them off a bridge or out a thirtieth floor window and grease a few palms. This is Thailand, honey, life is cheap. I can’t see anybody taking the time and care over a set-up like that. Why do you think she was pushed?”
“Instinct,” she said.
“Instinct is reason’s retarded little cousin. The one that nobody plays with. I’ve instinctively made some bad choices. Instinct led me to some dark places. Lost me some good friends. Judgements are a better way to go, but even then, you can’t be sure...”
“I knew her. We were close, very close... A ‘sleeping dictionary,’ I think they call it.”
Joe waited for her to continue. She didn’t, so he asked: “Who killed her?”
“That, I do not know. She was such a sweet girl. I cannot think who would want to kill her. After she left, something strange happened.”
“Yes?”
“A black dog came to my home.”
“What’s so strange about that? Thailand’s full of strange black dogs.”
“A black dog is a universal omen of doom,” she said.
“So is a glock 17. Forget the dog. Forget the doom. The dog and the doom have about as much bearing on this, as the pictures on the wall of this restaurant have on the food we are about to eat. A distraction and nothing more. You said you were close? Listen Carina, I will be blunt with you here; sleeping with someone doesn’t mean you know them any better than the next person. Maybe you weren’t close. The guy who sold her fruit from the market that day, or the woman who did her hair in the afternoon probably has a better idea what went down that day. They were close. Closer. This is life. The more time we spend with someone in a bubble of lust, the less we know them for what they really are. If there’s love involved, then the waters are even muddier. I would take a bet that your image of her and the real her, are two different people. People with different hopes, dreams and aspirations. People who were not working with each other’s interests at heart. Enemies. They killed each other: suicide.”
“Are you always this discourteous?” She said.
“I never hang around to ask. Maybe I have a way of getting to the point quickly. That is why people employ me. I apologize. Tell me about the suicide. Tell me what you want me to know.”
“She wasn’t a suicide. She wouldn’t do it,” Carina brushed her fingers through her hair. “She would never kill herself.” The palm of her hand fell down onto the table, upsetting her chopsticks. She picked them up and tore apart the plastic wrapping, screwing it into a ball. She looked directly across the table at Joe. “Never.”
“Look, Carina, it’s always the ones you think will never do it that end up hanging from a noose. The ones that you figure are just about to jump, never got the guts. Sharpening the knives and running the bath is usually just a call for attention. Suicide’s not something that can be predicted. It’s arbitrary and rare, like a good song on the radio or a useful lawyer. It doesn’t make any sense, so don’t bother trying.”
“You believe that?”
“It’s what I’ve come to understand. Do you have a suspect or a reason for suspicion?”
“No, that’s why I’m here. I want to hire you.”
“Death isn’t my speciality. I deal in fraud and deception. Cheating bargirls. Missing relatives. I’ve never investigated a murder in Bangkok City. It’s a matter for the police department. I don’t know what to say. Thanks for the offer, but I’ll have to decline the instruction.”
“She mentioned your name the last time we spoke…”
“That’s not unusual. In love and commerce, there’s always gonna be winners and losers. I’m the bad guy. The one that tells them that the party’s over. The one that breaks their bank balance.”
“She spoke fondly of you, Joe,” Carina smiled. She took another sip of her Asahi, “She called you, Mr. Detective.”
The realization hit Joe like a punch to the stomach.
“Her name was Monica,” Carina said.
The water tumbler slipped out of his hand and hit the tiled floor. The glass smashed. The waitress looked over and smiled patiently.
“Do I have your attention now?”
EIGHT
SHE DID.
The first thing Joe saw was that beehive, the cowboy boots, and the door slamming shut in his hovel of a hotel room. The dreams, the nightmares. The way she played with the meat under the blanket. The games. The secret. Michael. The photographs.
Carina toyed with a corner of the tablecloth for a moment, looked across at the Japanese, and then looked directly at Joe, “Monica said she had to tell you something, a message, it seemed important,” Carina smiled. “Once she sets her mind on something...”
“...she does it. What was the message?” What trouble had she had gotten herself into?
A man?
A customer?
A jealous boyfriend?
It was hopeless. Like a midnight duck shoot.
Blindfolded.
It could have been anything or anybody. Three days is a hell of a long time in Bangkok.
“She didn’t say. She just said that she had to find you.”
“Tell me everything, Carina. From the start. I want to know how you both met, where, when, why. Tell me all the little things that you think mean nothing. Anything and everything you can think of. Trust me.”
“Well, it started on the island of Ko Samui. I have a bungalow near the beach. It has a limestone rock pool and a tiny natural waterfall. It’s all very beautiful. She used to come and use the pool to swim in, without asking, sometimes she swam naked. Strange for a Thai, don’t you think? One day we got to talking, and then things just developed from there.”
“When was this?”
“Last year. Around April.”
The food arrived: Sushi. Grilled tiger prawns, steamed sea bass, Kobe beefsteak. Sashimi. Asparagus. Medley of vegetation. Salmon steak on an earthenware dish.
“What can you tell me about Monica? Was she into drugs, gambling? Anything at all, the smallest thing that you can remember that was bothering her?”
“She was a sweet girl, but troubled. Both her parents died when she was so young, no role models, bad schooling, and crippling poverty. She wasn’t addicted or ill as far as I knew, but abuse has a tendency to hide itself, you know?”
Joe knew. “Go on…”
“Her vitality was remarkable. Her spoken English was fluent. She wanted to learn to read and write fluently. She was trying to better herself and I was trying to help her. I was having the impression that English was important to her, but she would never tell me why she was so desperate to be improving her reading and writing. She even had a book list. Books that she wanted to understand,” Carina lifted a piece of salmon with her chopsticks, and dipped it in a cream sauce.
“I need that list. Can you remember any titles?”
“Mostly English novels, nineteenth and twentieth century. Dickens, stuff like that, not my sort of
thing,” she said as she ate the piece of salmon.
“Mine neither, but I need that list. Were you sponsoring her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Paying her money? Were you paying her money to sleep with you?”Joe knew that invasive questions often caused people to slip up and tell the truth. He picked up a spear of asparagus with the chopsticks and bathed it in the soy.
“Quite the opposite. She paid me for English lessons; we then became lovers. She was not sleeping with me for money.”
“Gifts?”
“A gold bracelet. That was it. She was wearing it when they found her.”
“The police are keeping it as evidence?”
“They have not been very helpful,” she said.
Joe nodded sympathetically. He knew just how unhelpful they could be.
“Are you familiar with my terms?” He asked her.
“Half up front?”
“Yes. Write down anything that you think of, anything at all. I need a list of contacts. I need that book list.”
She handed Joe a folded piece of paper from her handbag. “Before she disappeared, I checked her telephone, I hate the jealous type, but I did it because I was desperate. These are the numbers.” Joe took the piece of pink folded notebook paper and pocketed it.
“Thanks. Did you love her?”
“Dearly.” Carina’s eyes moistened, “She always had money. I didn’t know where it was coming from. The trips to Bangkok were unexplained, but I didn’t ask. Maybe I knew the truth, but I didn’t want to believe it. I’ve been so foolish, again. We had something important together.”
The table next to theirs filled with a family of four. Two children played with the chopsticks. They waved them in the air. They attacked imaginary flying insects. The mother scorned them and the father drank a beer. The waitress came over and took the plates away. Carina ordered a bottle of sake. Joe stayed with the water like a rowing boat tied to a buoy in a storm.
“There was a note, with the body, forensics has it. I copied it down.” She passed it to Joe.
“What does it say?” He asked.
“My Thai is good, but not that strong. The words are kind of abstract. It begins with the phrase, Yom pae.”
“That’s Thai for surrender.”
“Yes. There are consonants that exist in the Thai language but are no longer used?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, she uses them in the note. It says something about a secret box. I asked a young woman in a translation office to translate it into English. She did not want to do it. She was afraid. Would make sense if I had told her who had written it, but I didn’t. I just said I found the note at home and was curious as to what it meant.”
The word secret sounded familiar.
“I’ll have it translated. Do you have an address for the apartment?”
“Yes, it’s with the phone numbers, she was only there a few days, she pays up front. It’s in Udom Suk, you know it?”
“Right,” Joe knew the area, east of the city. Concrete slums and apartment blocks filled with immigrant workers. A sprinkling of Thai-Chinese and Taiwanese. Conflicting tribes of Asians who fight with guns in Bangkok. Street fights. Gangs. “Last week a nine-year-old school kid was shot dead on a public bus. It’s kind of like inner-city LA, without the creativity.”
“How did she end up there?”
“The same way we all do. It’s the end of the road.”
NINE
THEY SAT staring at the walls, the lizards, and the storks. The bottle of rice wine. He thought about it.
One shot.
Just one.
Make it all go away.
One shot.
Forget about why some men had trouble sucking in oxygen and breathing it out. Why the best women on that rock disappeared inside cold-water rooms. None of it made sense. Some cats wrote books and made movies about how it didn’t make sense. Some sat around in a room and talked about how it didn’t make sense. Some had better sense than to question why it didn’t make sense.
The steps came back to him.
The twelve steps.
One.
A tiny mistake can cause a lifetime of remorse.
Two. Images of black dogs.
Three, god-darn three. Frog-scratchers and suicides.
Four.
Ghosts rose into focus clear and sharp and then disappeared behind the Japanese hardwood screens.
Five.
The corporate dinners and the waitress in the kimono with the hair set up like she meant business. Looked like she could suck a noodle through a tea strainer.
Six.
Secrets – what was that secret?
Seven. She’s ready to pour Joe a large one.
Eight. The blonde across the table. Pins like a racehorse,
and Nine.
Monica had good taste.
Ten.
Suicide.
Eleven.
She
Wouldn’t.
Twelve.
Do it.
“How could anyone stay in Bangkok, sober?” Carina looked directly at Joe.
“An addict’s home is a house of shame and Bangkok ticks all the boxes. On the program, they say you are only as evil as your secrets. Monica had a secret. Hell, this whole town is one big pack of secrets. When the penultimate president finally sobered up, he got the world’s most powerful country to screw up and he made a good job of it. I get to screw around in a tropical metropolis where nothing makes much sense.” His hand reached out across the table to pick up the bottle, the cure, the answer, and then something unexplainable stopped it.
A fly landed on the table.
His hand came down.
Rubbed it out.
Carina’s voice. “What makes you keep it together?” She took another hit of the rice wine.
“Back when I was a kid, I saw some bad things happen and shortly after that, something happened that made me reconsider the humanity of man, woman and beast. I never could figure it out and perhaps I wasn’t meant to. Maybe we are here to ask questions rather than answer them. The trouble is the world is full of mouths asking questions, no ears listening, and no bright spark got the answers apart from the great silent one up in the sky.”
“God?”
“God, Allah, Buddha, whoever you bend down or kneel over for. I always liked to ask questions and some of my answers added up. Mathematics alienated me. Nobody likes a smart ass. I work alone.”
“Always?”
“Yes, I took so many cases that I decided that I couldn’t trust anybody. You can only understand the human animal by observing her objectively from afar. Statistics in any country show that you are most likely to be killed by the people that are supposed to be the closest to you. A boyfriend, a girlfriend, a drug dealer. Only a few people have those who love them enough to kill them. I used to work for a syndicate in London. They would send me out to New York, Vienna, Mexico City – wherever there was a suspicious claim on a financial contract. Before that, I cleaned money for the mob. What I’m doing now is safer; I am getting bored of danger. However, I’m just beginning to figure the biggest enemy is the inner-man. There’s a parasite inside all of us that isn’t working to our advantage.”
“Is that not called something, Joe? Yes, wait, let’s see, I think they call it paranoia?”
“Maybe a paranoid is just a wise man with most of the facts in his locker. Even paranoids have enemies. In my experience, you’re better off tackling this world alone and observing from afar. When I realized this, I knew that I was a Bangkok detective.”
“It must be gloomy in your world.”
“We all need substance, honey, and not just food and water. We’re all screwed up until we’re either dead, enlightened, or nailed on a cross.
When you finish figuring out the jigsaw puzzle, you realize that there is one piece missing. That missing piece is in Bangkok.”
“What can you do?”
“You can keep looking is what you do. That missing piece is somewhere. In a bar, an art gallery, or under the bed. In the smile of a neon ballerina after last orders. In the street. In a beggar’s alms bowl. Somewhere…”
“Life’s like that,” Carina smiled and picked up her shot of rice wine. She drank it down in one sip. Her nose wrinkled.
“Yeah,” Joe’s hand began to move again. He gripped the tablecloth and screwed up a section into a ball underneath the table. He was beginning to sweat.
“So what’s wrong with that?”
“Familiarity can be dangerous and freedom doesn’t exist. Bangkok is like an alcoholic mother; cruel, spiteful, unpredictable and totally uncaring, but sometimes surprisingly entertaining.”
“You know, that’s strangely poetic,” Carina smiled with her eyes.
“Once I realized the reasons why I was here, it was too late to turn back. I learned to deal with the same shit in a tropical climate. This place is the end of the world. From the cracks in the pavement, to the rats and cockroaches and the transsexual hookers. It all screams one word.”
“What’s the word?”
“Desire.”
They thought about it for enough time for it to become uncomfortable.
“You think Monica upset someone?” Carina asked.
Joe did, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he drank his soda water wishing it were sake. “I can’t say until I’ve seen what’s left of that apartment. Until I’ve had a look around. Asked some questions.”
“You want me to come with you?” Carina sat her next one down.
“No, I work alone. It sounds cliché, but it’s true. Plus, I need to be unobtrusive. A six-foot blonde in Bangkok is not inconspicuous. I might as well take a polar bear with me. Thanks, but no thanks. Think hard. Did Monica ever have any secrets? Did she talk about a secret?”
“Everybody has secrets, don’t they?”
“Not everyone. There are still some pure people left in the world. People with nothing to hide. Did Monica ever tell you she had a secret?”
Red Night Zone - Bangkok City Page 3