Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

  Believe it or not, I don’t spend any of the money. Vikorn’s accountant wires my modest ten percent share of the profits into my account with the Thai Farmer’s Bank every quarter, and I let it stack up, preferring to live on my cop’s salary in my hovel by the river when I’m not sleeping at the club. To be honest, I’ve promised the Buddha that when I get the chance I’ll do something useful with it. Does that sound pathetic to you, farang? It does to me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. When I tried to take some money out of the account to buy a fantastic pair of shoes by Baker-Benje on sale in the Emporium (only $500), I was prevented by some mystic force.

  After helping my Colonel into his cab, I stroll down the street, now entirely empty of farang. Some of the stalls boast electric lights, powered by illegal hookups to the illegal cables that grow up the walls of our buildings like black ivy, but most use gas lighting, which hisses and makes the mantles burn brilliantly. I see many beautiful and familiar faces dip in and out of this chiaroscuro, every girl ravenous after her night’s work. In between the cooked food stalls, fortune tellers have set up their minimalist presentations: a table and two chairs for the well-to-do, a shawl on the ground for the others.

  Each turn of the Tarot cards causes a female heart to leap or sink: marriage, health, money, baby, an overseas trip with a promising farang? Nothing has changed since I was a kid. To add to the festive atmosphere, a blind singer with a microphone chants a doleful Thai dirge with one hand on the shoulder of his companion, who carries the loudspeaker on a strap as they make their majestic progress down the street. I toss a hundred-baht note into the box, then, remembering Chanya and the need for luck, chuck in another thousand.

  Everyone knows me: “Sonchai, how’s business?” “Hello, Sonchai, got a job for me?” “Papa Sonchai, my beloved papasan,” in a tone of playful satire. “When will you dance for us again, Detective?”

  I’m very happy that Vikorn has saved Chanya from that crude and undiscriminating justice they have in America where, if they extradited her, they would never make allowances for her youth and beauty, the stress inherent in her profession, or the ugliness of her victim. Nor would she be able to purchase indulgences in the manner of our more flexible system. That remark about not knowing what she got up to in the United States, though—it is clear proof of the superior vision of his mind, not to say the paranoia that is a professional hazard for a gangster of his stature. Me, for example: I have never given her time over there a second thought. Didn’t she simply work in a massage parlor like all the others?

  All of a sudden I experience a dramatic slowing of my thoughts, a draining of energy after prolonged tension. I’m totally burned out, about to crash. I walk slowly back to the bar and mount the stairs to one of the second-floor rooms to lie down. It is eight minutes past five in the morning, and the first signs of dawn have popped out of the night one by one: the muezzin chanting from a nearby mosque, early birdsong, an insomniac cicada, new light in the east.

  We Thais have our own favorite cure for emotional exhaustion. No pills, no alcohol, no dope, no therapy—we simply hit the sack. Sounds simple, but it works. In fact, in survey after survey we have admitted that sleep is our favorite hobby. (We know there’s something better on the other side.)

  It turns out that the Mitch Turner case has disturbed me at some deep level, however, for in my sleep my dead partner and soul brother Pichai comes to me, or rather I visit him. He sits in a circle of meditating monks who exude honey-colored glows and at first does not want to be disturbed. I insist, and slowly he emerges from his divine trance. Want to help? I ask. Look for Don Buri, Pichai replies, then returns to the group.

  I wake up deeply puzzled, for buri is Thai for cigarette. Don, I think, is Spanish for mister. That’s Pichai at his most gnomic, I’m afraid. I guess I’ll have to rely on more conventional sources. Even so, the dream continues to replay in my head in the form of a question: Who in the world is Don Buri?

  4

  By the time I finally get up, it’s early evening and I feel guilty for neglecting Lek.

  Lek is my new cadet, assigned to me by Vikorn himself. He’s been training with me for over a month, and I try to take the responsibility seriously. Nong, though, sees him more as a family slave and insists that I educate him in the finer points of domestic service. Trying to strike a balance here, but submitting to her bullying nonetheless (there are reasons why he needs to get along with her), I call him on his cell phone and tell him to pick me up at the club.

  Six thirty-five, and the city is still at a standstill from the rush hour. Lek and I sit in the back of the cab, the driver of which has tuned his radio permanently to FM97, or as we Bangkokians call it, Rod Tit FM (Traffic Jam FM). All over the city people imprisoned in vehicles without possibility of parole are using their cell phones to participate in Pisit’s call-in radio program. The theme this evening is the scandal of the three young cops who proved conclusively that three young women were engaged in prostitution by having sex with them for money. “With cops like these who needs criminals? Call me on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon.” Now calls from the gridlock flood in, mostly in a mood of hilarity. Lek, though, eighteen years old and only three months out of the academy, wrinkles his nose.

  “Have you spoken to your mother yet?” He has managed to make his head lower than mine so that his delicate face is turned up to me like a flower, his hazel eyes oozing charm. In a feudal society everything is feudal, which is to say personal. I am not merely his supervisor, I’m his lord and master, and his fate rests in my hands. He needs me to love him.

  “Give me time,” I say. “With women the mood is everything. Especially with Nong.”

  “Are you going to speak to Colonel Vikorn?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a judgment call.” I have the cab stop at the junction of Soi 4 and Sukhumvit.

  The story of our errand goes like this. Once upon a time, not more than five or ten years ago, every side soi on Sukhumvit boasted at least one stall that sold fried grasshoppers, but with the relentless blanket bombing of our culture by yours, farang, we grew somewhat self-conscious about this quaint weakness of ours, with the result that—in Krung Thep, anyway—our insect cuisine was driven underground. At the same time, though, avant-garde farang cottoned on to this culinary exoticum with the enthusiasm of the pretentious, so that now the one place where you can buy fried grasshoppers is the farang-dominated Nana Plaza.

  We arrive at Nana just when the various hunting lodges, known as go-go bars, are shifting into top gear. “Handsome man, I want to go with yooo,” a girl in black tank top calls out to me over the palisade of one of the beer bars, but Lek’s star is far brighter than mine. Neither the girls nor the katoeys (transsexuals to you, farang) can take their eyes off him as we push our way past mighty Caucasian bodies in sweaty T-shirts and walking shorts, half drunk more with the sexual opportunities than with the alcohol, although everyone is knocking back ice-cold beer from the bottle. This evening every TV monitor, and there must be about five hundred, is tuned to a tennis match between our very own Paradorn and someone nobody cares about in the French Open. There’s no commentary, however, because the ten thousand sound systems are all booming out the usual combination of Thai pop and Robbie Williams.

  Finally we reach the far end of the plaza, which is dominated by katoeys who drool at the sight of Lek. In a serious breach of authenticity the stall owner at the back of the plaza has labeled his various products in English: waterbug, silkworm, mole cricket, ant mix, dried frog, bamboo worm, scorpion, grasshopper. I load up on grasshoppers for me, waterbugs, silkworms, mixed ants, and dried frogs for Mum. While the vendor is pouring ants into a paper cone, Lek and I spare a moment to watch a ritual that is far more ancient than Buddhism. Young women in short frilly dresses—this is a bar where the schoolgirl fantasy is intermittently and imprecisely invoked—are standing behind one another in a line with their legs apart while the girl at the front draws elaborate shapes on the ground
with a large wooden phallus. When the luck god has been summoned, she sends the phallus skidding across the floor between the girls’ feet, then bangs loudly on the door to the club. Straightening herself with the air of a job well done (if that doesn’t bring in the johns, I don’t know what will), she leads the girls back into the bar and the twenty-first century.

  Back at the club I make sure that Lek carries the little bags of insects and hands them to my mother, who has not yet opened for business. (She was waiting for supper.) We all sit down in the bar to eat what, I suppose, is breakfast, and for twenty minutes there is silence save for the snapping of legs and the squirting of guts. When I’ve finished, I leave Lek with my mother while I climb the stairs with the last packet of grasshoppers.

  Chanya is awake and beautifully rested after her prolonged sojourn in the arms of Morpheus. She is wearing an outsize T-shirt and nothing else, sitting in a half-lotus on the bed with her back against the wall. I offer her the open packet, and she delicately picks out a fat one to munch. She flashes me a comradely smile marred only by the remains of a hairy leg in the corner of her mouth, apparently suffering no ill effects from her killing spree beyond a touch of nervousness in her eyes as I hand her her statement. (The advantage of a culture of shame as opposed to one of guilt is that you don’t start to feel bad until the shit hits the fan.)

  She reads it carefully, then looks up. “You wrote it? This is your writing.”

  “The Colonel dictated. I simply wrote it down.”

  “Colonel Vikorn? He must be a genius. This is exactly how it happened.”

  “Really?”

  “Every detail is correct, except he drank Budweiser, not Mekong whiskey.”

  “A minor detail. Let’s not bother to change it. I’ll corroborate Mekong if it comes to that. I was behind the bar, after all.”

  That iron-melting smile: “That’s fine then.”

  I cough and try not to look too sadly at her long black hair. “Just one thing—you’ll have to cut your hair and disappear for a while. Do something else, be someone else for a couple of months, until we can see how the land lies.”

  A shrug and a smile. “Okay, whatever the Colonel says.”

  “We’ll bring you back to work as soon as we can. We have to know what the Americans are going to do when they find out what’shisname is dead. How heavy will they get? How valuable was he to them? You see the problem?”

  “Of course. I’ll probably cut it all off—I’ve always wanted to meditate in a nunnery. Maybe I’ll do a meditation course upcountry somewhere.”

  “That’ll be fine,” I say, although the thought of her losing all her hair almost moves me to tears. A slightly awkward silence. “Chanya, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if there’s anything you did in the States when you were over there that you think we should know about . . .”

  She searches my eyes. In hers I see only innocence. “I worked of course. The money was fantastic, especially in Las Vegas. It’s a wonderful country, but a bit bland. I got bored after a while. I was planning to come home as soon as I had enough dough to build my own house in Surin, and enough to retire on, but 9/11 ruined my plans. I came home sooner than I intended and for family reasons I needed more money. I stayed here because you’re a good papasan, and your mother’s been a good boss. It’s fun. I like your club.”

  The temptation to ask her exactly what happened last night is very strong, but my professional discipline, learned at the feet of my master Vikorn, enables me to resist. That was one hell of a disemboweling, though. Even for a Thai, her coolness is a little unusual, not to say downright scary. I fear my smile was just a tad alienated when I left her alone with her statement and the packet of crickets. I didn’t even ask about the opium since that did not officially exist. I noticed she’d got rid of the pipe.

  Downstairs my mother has Lek cleaning glasses. I check the time, then switch to the radio on the sound system to listen to Rod Tit FM. Every cop in District 8 will be listening at this moment, for Pisit has told us he has a scoop on the eternal and notorious battle between our beloved Colonel Vikorn and that blackguard General Zinna, who has just emerged unscathed from a court-martial in which he had to explain his apparent involvement in large-scale trafficking of heroin and morphine. His claim that he was framed by the police, in particular Vikorn, was tacitly accepted by the court.

  Pisit begins by reminding us that this drug rivalry between the army and the police is not new. Every Thai has heard about, and some still remember, the great standoff up in Chiang Mai in the fifties when civil war seemed about to break out over a dispute between the two services as to who exactly owned a massive shipment of opium that the Kuomintang (with the connivance of the CIA) had sent into Thailand by train. The standoff lasted three days before a compromise was reached: the entire shipment would be dumped into the sea. According to legend, the dumping of the several tons of opium was organized by the Director of Police, who arranged for a ship to be in the way. Now the perennial battle seems to have fallen onto the shoulders of Vikorn and Zinna. What Pisit didn’t tell us in advance is that his source today is none other than Zinna himself.

  Pisit: General Zinna, it is a great honor to have you on this show. You must be relieved and exhausted after your ordeal.

  Zinna: What ordeal?

  Pisit: General, I was referring to the court-martial that cleared your name.

  Zinna: Oh, that. I was framed by a certain police colonel, everyone knows that.

  Pisit: But General, if this is true, it is dynamite. Any particular reason why this police colonel, whom we shall not name, or indeed any policeman, would desire your downfall?

  Zinna: Simple—they’re scared of exposure. Right now the police run Thailand. Look at the news every day, what do we find? We find naked, unadorned reports of police corruption throughout the country at every level of the police force, but not a damned thing is being done about it. Why? Because the government itself is scared of the police. The police have become the only cohesive power in our country. And they call this democracy. That particular police colonel we have already mentioned is always going on about democracy. It’s all just a power play, of course. This is the problem with the West, it is childishly superficial. Create a system that resembles theirs, no matter how defective and corrupt, and they praise you. Create a different system, and they try to undermine you. So what the cops have so cleverly produced is a police state that looks like a democracy. No wonder farang love us. It’s their system exactly.

  Pisit: And the police are scared of the army because it is the only viable alternative to them?

  Zinna: Certainly. And the only unit powerful enough to expose them and survive.

  Pisit: Nothing to do with rivalry over income sources?

  Zinna: What are you getting at?

  Pisit: General, you just referred to reports of police corruption. I would guess at least fifty percent of those complaints are drug related.

  Zinna: Of course. There has to be motivation for cops to run the country. Under the guise of democracy, of course.

  Pisit: And if the army ran the country again?

  Zinna: That is a very provocative hypothetical.

  Pisit: What would you like to do to that certain police colonel who framed you?

  Zinna: That is a private matter between him and me.

  Lek, of the abbreviated attention span, has tried to follow but lacks the background that makes the interview comprehensible. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

  My mother and I exchange a glance. “The Colonel’s never been the same since his son Ravi died,” Nong says.

  No wiser, Lek turns his wide eyes onto me. “The army shot Ravi during the troubles in May ’92,” I explain.

  5

  The landline rings. It’s the forensic team in quite a tizzy. They want me over there at the hotel where Mitch Turner died right away. I think about taking Lek, but he’s doing his professional duty as he sees it by ingratiating hi
mself with my mother (they’re discussing the finer points of mascara application), so I go on my own.

  When I arrive, I see what they mean. In their zeal they turned the corpse over and left it that way. Now they are all staring at me staring at it. I’m not sure whether to vomit or simply scratch my head. I am too stunned to do either. My mind flashes back to Chanya and the way she was this morning: cool and bright, cheerful as a lark. Shaking my head, I lift the receiver on the hotel phone and tell the operator to get me Vikorn at the police station. For once he is actually in his office.

  “The forensic boys turned him over.”

  “So?”

  “He’s been flayed. From shoulders to the top of his backside. The whole of the surface skin is gone. It’s just a bloody mess.”

  A long pause, during which I think even Vikorn is stumped. Then: “Tell them to turn him back the way they found him. Have they taken photographs of his back?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell them to destroy those.” A click as he hangs up.

  While staring at the victim as they turn him over again, I am thinking farang, I’m thinking France, Germany, England, Japan, the United States, G8, I’m thinking decadence. In a single stroke the case has been taken out of Thai psychology, and I’m reduced to whatever cultural insights I acquired overseas. The poor, you see, murder honestly for passion, land, money, or superstition, so this brutal disemboweling/castration appeared at first glance as a common enough expression of rage, fear, or greed well within the grassroots tradition of every third-world country. (The severed penis, frankly, appeared to me as Thai as tom yam soup.) The flaying, though, that gratuitous extra, can only come from a society with a large, wealthy, and bored middle class. (It has ennui written all over it.) So what the hell did happen to Chanya in America?