Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

She smiles politely and gets up to lead us downstairs. Clearly this is as much risk as she can take. The interview is over. Outside, on the magnificent pillared porch, she rests her eyes on Lek. “Can you really take care of him? He’s too beautiful, too innocent.” Reaching out, she strokes his hair as if he were a dog. “Poor darling hasn’t been wounded yet. I do hope you survive.”

  In the cab Lek controls himself for as long as he can, then blurts: “So when do I get to see Fatima?”

  “I’ve got to prepare her. She may not want the responsibility. Give me a week or so.” Softening my words with a smile: “I’m quite busy, you know.”

  22

  I’m feeling pretty good, farang. In fact, I’m feeling like a farang. Truth be told, I cannot recall ever carefully preparing a watertight case and generally going the whole investigative nine yards. I must admit it’s not something I’d want to do more than once in a while, it’s so damned time-consuming (I mean, nine times out of ten you know whodunit so you grow the evidence accordingly—it’s one of those efficient Asian techniques you’ll have to adopt as global competition heats up—can’t have your law enforcement potting fewer perps per cop than us, can you—especially now you’ve dumped the rule of law in all cases where it proves inconvenient, right?), but Vikorn wants it done by the book this time. We’re going to leak the evidence to the media and run it on the Internet, so the judges will have to nail Zinna or risk impeachment themselves—there will be no funny business behind the scenes like last time. So I’m sitting at my desk making one of those lists cops like me never make:

  Evidence

  1. The dope. Well, it’s definitely morphine that Buckle was carrying, our forensic boys did all the tests, and Ruamsantiah called them on the telephone this morning: Of course it’s morphine—is the Dalai Lama a Buddhist? They’re happy to go into print, we’ll have the report by this evening.

  2. Chaz Buckle, with a little chemical inducement, is ready to sign off on his increasingly detailed revelation of the Denise operation and her connection to Zinna.

  3. Khun Mu, with a guarantee of security from Vikorn and a sum of money that he won’t discuss (but will have to be enough to buy Mu a new identity and a new life with no loss of amenities: I reckon well over a million dollars has changed hands), will testify that the meeting between Zinna, Denise, and Chaz Buckle did indeed take place on her land.

  All I have to do is find Denise and bang her up for a week or so until she’s ready to confess all she knows about Zinna in return for a dramatic reduction in what would otherwise be a death sentence. It doesn’t get much neater and more satisfying than that, and I’m ready to concede there are times when your system has its merits, farang. (Promotion, here I come.)

  Except that my mobile is ringing, and I’m having one of those gloomy glimpses into the immediate future. I see from the screen on the phone that the call is from Ruamsantiah.

  In a depressed tone: “We had to let the farang Chaz Buckle go.”

  “Huh?”

  “Our forensic boys decided the stuff he was carrying was just icing sugar after all. They claimed the first tests used contaminated instruments that misled them.”

  “Zinna paid them off?”

  “Is there another explanation? The General sent some high-powered lawyer to explain to us that we have no legal right to hold Buckle. Then the Director of Police called Vikorn to tell him to let him go.”

  “How’s Vikorn taking it?”

  “He’s in his office waving his gun around.”

  I close on Ruamsantiah and take a deep breath before I call Vikorn on his mobile.

  Vikorn: “You’ve heard?”

  “Yes. We had to let him go.”

  “Have you any idea what this is doing to my face?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be a laughingstock.”

  “Not necessarily. We can call for a second opinion on the dope, maybe send it to a farang agency overseas.”

  “So then we end up with two conflicting forensic reports. That’s all the wriggle room he needs.”

  “You can’t give up now.”

  “Thais laugh at losers. I’m looking like the loser here. I frame him, he gets off. I grab one of his couriers, he springs him.”

  What can I say? This is all true.

  “Be careful—he hasn’t finished yet,” Vikorn says despondently, and closes the phone.

  I’m back at the bar in the evening. It’s quite a slow night, and I’m thinking of closing early, when my mobile starts to ring. It is the colonel in charge of the Klong Toey district. It seems that a squat, muscular, unusually ugly, and tattooed farang has been found dumped in the river. Someone told him I might know something about it. I call Lek to tell him to pick me up in a cab.

  23

  At the junction of Ratchadaphisek and Rama IV, Lek says: “I’ve never been to Klong Toey before. Is it as bad as they say?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You don’t mind about going there at night, just the two of us?”

  “We’re cops, Lek.”

  “I know. I wasn’t asking for myself. I feel so safe with you. You’re like a kind of Buddha for me—just being with you banishes fear.”

  “You have to stop talking like that.”

  “Because it’s not macho cop? But I love you for what you’re doing for me—I can’t deny my heart.” I sigh. “Would you mind telling me when we’re going to meet my Elder Sister?”

  “When we’re ready. You and me.”

  The truth is, I’ve still not found the stomach to introduce Lek to Fatima. Every time I pick up the phone to call her, I have a vision of her eating the kid alive. “Look, Lek, remember what you were telling me the other day, about the path of a katoey being the toughest, loneliest path a human being can choose?”

  “I didn’t choose it. The spirit who saved my life chose it.”

  “Right. And maybe that spirit has chosen Fatima—but I need to be sure. I feel like I’m holding your life in my hands here.”

  Lek stretches out a hand to rest on my knee for a moment. “The Buddha will give you enlightenment for this. You’re so advanced, you’re almost there.”

  “I don’t feel advanced. I feel like I’m corrupting youth.”

  Lek smiles. “That only shows how holy you are. But I have to follow my path, don’t I? This is my destiny we’re talking about. My karma. My fate.”

  “Right.”

  “Will you lend me the money for the collagen implants in my buttocks and chest?”

  I groan. “I guess so.”

  Klong Toey: grave crime at its most poetic. The talat (market) is the emotional center, a square acre of green umbrellas and tarps beneath which chilies lie short and wicked on poor women’s shawls; chickens cram together dead or alive; ducks grumble in wooden cages; every kind of crab mimes death agonies in plastic bowls or gasps in the heat (both fresh- and saltwater, soft shell or hard); open-air butchers chop up whole buffalo; jackfruit, pineapple, orange, durian, grapefruit, bolts of cheap cotton, every kind of hand tool for the third-world handyman (generally of such inferior steel, they give out during the first hour—I have a personal vendetta against our screwdrivers, which bend like pewter—they would drive you totally nuts, farang); and so on. There are even some corrugated iron shacks nearby from the skulduggery school of architecture, joined clandestinely by precarious walkways that cry out for a chase scene, but most of the buildings surrounding the square are three-story shop-houses of the Chinese tradition. The sidewalks provide good clues as to the business of the shops: whole automobile engines pile up outside their ateliers dripping black oil; air-conditioning ducts of all dimensions stand proud outside another; CD rip-offs on stalls, the latest boom boxes block the way outside the stereo store. There are no farang here (either they don’t know, or knowing, they stay away), these slow-moving crowds of brown folk are as local as somtam salad, common as rice. The point: Klong Toey district includes the main port on the Chao Phraya river, where ships have unloaded sin
ce the beginning of time. (There are sepia pix of our forefathers in traditional three-quarter black pants, naked to the waist, their long black hair tied back from their fine foreheads in magnificent ponytails, unloading by hand in the impossible heat, many emaciated from your opium, farang.) A couple of streets away: a fine big customs shed and a complex of buildings belonging to the Port Authority of Thailand. The river itself is no more than a stone’s throw away, and many of the original inhabitants of this seething township have built their shacks on stilts on the other side of the water. Medieval riverboat men ferry the poor to and fro for twenty baht a trip in their modest hand-built canoes (with Yamaha outboards and millionaire bow-waves). In short, everyone knows the main industry is pharmaceuticals, for there is probably nowhere in Thailand where dealers, kingpins, addicts, cops, and customs are so conveniently massed together in one square mile of business-friendly riverfront real estate. Inevitably spin-off industries such as contract slaying, loan-sharking, and extortion have moved their headquarters here. I’m a little surprised that Colonel Bumgrad is troubling himself with a mere Trance 808. I was afraid of hostility on his part, for he is one of Vikorn’s many enemies, but he’s the incarnation of charm as he greets me when Lek and I get out of the cab.

  They’ve laid Chaz Buckle out on the dockside under a blanket. The police launch is tied up to a capstan between two gigantic container vessels. The view is blocked in every direction by looming bows, rusting sterns, and iron gangplanks. Impenetrable marine shadows cast darkness over the poorly lit footpaths. Bumgrad nods to me, and I lift the blanket: a single shot in the back of the head, with exit wound that blew out his left eye. He is soggy from time spent in the river, but the assassination is recent. Even if I did not recognize the ruined face, the tattoos would have been identification enough.

  “We haven’t checked his pockets yet,” Bumgrad murmurs. “We thought maybe you would want to do that.”

  I lean over the body, then jump back as a small blind eel wriggles from out his mouth. His pockets are undulating. Lek, watching closely, puts a hand over his mouth. When I rip open his shirt, I see that his stomach, too, is in perpetual motion. There is a faint pop, and a blind white head with mouth full of tiny teeth emerges from his belly button. I snap my head around—is this some kind of joke?—but Bumgrad and his men are gone, disappeared into the black maze of the dock. Lek steps back, stifling a squeal. Eels are burrowing out of the corpse, desperate to find a way back to the river. I also take ten paces back.

  A whoreshriek from the bows of the container boat—sailors are a specialized market that my mother and I don’t touch—then silence, save for the ring of iron-shod heels. A short stocky uniformed figure with ramrod back and voluminous chest emerges from the dark beyond and marches toward us until he is standing in a pool of light shed by a small lamp hanging from a ship’s cable. I slowly get to my feet, close my hands in a wai, and raise them to my lips.

  “Good evening, General Zinna,” I say, carefully maintaining the wai.

  Without replying, the General walks slowly toward me and stares down at the corpse. “Someone exercised compassion,” he says in a whispered baritone. “They killed him before they shoved the eels up his ass. That way he didn’t feel them eating his guts out. I doubt I would show such restraint toward someone who really irritated me. Know what I mean?” He raises a hand, and snaps his fingers once. There is a sound of running boots; now more than a dozen young men in black sweatshirts and army haircuts are emerging from the shadows at a jog. They stand behind him in military formation until he nods to two of them, who go over to Chaz to shine a flashlight on his belly, which is now quite eaten away with a tangle of white writhing worms. The General walks over, picks one of the eels out of Chaz’s guts, deftly kills it by whipping its head against the capstan, and returns to me.

  As he slides the dead eel into my trouser pocket, in hardly more than a murmur: “Tell Colonel Vikorn he’s gone too far. He framed me, I got off, now the dope belongs to me. He doesn’t get a second shot. I’ll have his guts, one way or another.” Casting a contemptuous glance at Lek: “And I’ll have your bum boy, too.”

  He and his men turn and leave. We are alone in marine darkness with a corpse full of hungry eels. As if sensing the coast is clear, the girl at the bow of the ship shrieks and laughs again with impressive professionalism calculated to make her sailor feel powerful, predatory, irresistible, charming, and horny. It seems a secret party is under way, for a couple more girls cry out, laugh, make vulgar jokes in Thai while their men shout in Chinese. Three female faces appear over the bows, then immediately disappear.

  Sudden quiet, in which the soft padding of a large rat can be heard. Far off someone is crossing the river in a long-tail boat. I decide to save the man I once interrogated from further forensic indignity, but it is not easy. He’s heavy and elusive in the way of corpses. Grasping his wrists and signaling for Lek to help me, I drag him to the side of the dock, twist him around, then try to push him in. Lek leans over from the hips, elegantly failing to grasp the cadaver’s feet. I’m sweating in the night heat and experiencing an irrational reluctance to make contact with the eels, which are still feasting. With a foot on one shoulder, near the neck, I give a mighty shove. His arms still outstretched, the tattoos Mother and Denise are the last of him to slide over the edge and into the river with the most discreet of splashes.

  I reach into my pocket and throw Zinna’s dead eel after him. Where’s Lek? Frantic for a second (I experience a vision of rape and degradation at the hands of Zinna’s men), I catch sight of him a little farther down the dock, in a pool of light.

  The most classic of all our classical dance derives from the Hindu Ramayana, in which the god Vishnu incarnates as Rama and gets into a fight with evil over the life of his bride Sita. Lek is playing Sita on her knees pleading for her lord and master to believe in her eternal fidelity.

  I put my arm around him as I lead him away. “He called me a bum boy.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not a bum boy, I’m a dancer.”

  “I know you are.”

  He turns his big hazel eyes onto me, merciless in his trust, love, and expectation.

  When we pass the spot, we hear the ferocious churning of fish and eels that the T808 is feeding. For a tantalizing moment I see his life disperse into its many components, which spin away from one another into the night. The composite problem that was Chaz Buckle is now resolved.

  24

  It seems, though, that other composites are resolving into dust and spirit this violent night. Just after I’ve dropped Lek off at his project, Lieutenant Manhatsirikit calls me on my mobile.

  “The Colonel’s at Khun Mu’s house. Better get over there.”

  There’s nothing much to say, farang, that you have not already guessed. At Khun Mu’s house all the dogs and monkeys are dead (gutted), the guards executed, mostly by bullets to the skull. Khun Mu, naked, is wrapped around Joey’s embalmed corpse in an obscene position, her throat cut. And there is a fat dead farang woman in her mid-forties slit from gut to chest, lying on the king-size bed in the great bedroom, wearing only a huge pair of shorts.

  “Denise?” I ask Vikorn.

  He nods. “She lived in a million-dollar mansion overlooking the Andaman Sea in Phuket. He kidnapped her and brought her here just to show that he could.” A shaking of the head. “Just to make a point.” Looking at me: “All our witnesses are dead.”

  Vikorn walks over to the sofa by the window and sits heavily. I’ve never seen him so despondent. “We’ve been going against him symmetrically,” he mutters, “that’s the problem. We can’t beat him on violence. He’s the army, for Buddha’s sake.” A quick glance at me. “I’m sorry, Sonchai. I’m taking the file away from you.”

  “You have someone better?”

  “It needs nuance, a woman’s touch.”

  “Manny? She’s not exactly subtle.”

  He shrugs: no comment. He is huddled on his seat, shr
unken, the very image of defeat; there are even tears in his eyes. I feel a great wave of pity—but wait! Somehow his projection of despair, frustration, misery, near-senility is a little too pat.

  “Someone’s come up with a Plan C, haven’t they?”

  He looks at me blankly as if he has no idea what I’m talking about.

  At the station the next day, it is revealed that Vikorn spent the morning watching international news on his TV, which is normally dedicated to Thai pool. (He runs the main gambling syndicate.) When I go in to see him, I find him fixated by the monitor. It seems there has been a terrorist bomb in some remote village in Java, Indonesia, five Indonesian Hindus dead, about twenty more hospitalized. No one doubts the culprits are from an extreme Muslim faction, particularly because one of them died in the blast. Bits of his skullcap and beard, some fingers, a leg, and other body parts have been recovered. It is anticipated that his identity and that of the particular splinter group to which he belonged will soon be known. Naturally, the Western intelligence agencies are interested and only too willing to lend assistance.

  I have no idea why Vikorn, who is hardly a fully globalized world citizen (I’m not sure he could identify France on a map), should be so interested, but when I cough with a view to attracting his attention, he raises a hand. When the news program has exhausted its real-time coverage, he lifts his telephone and—to my amazement—tells Lieutenant Manhatsirikit to get him on the next flight to Jakarta. While he is on the way to the airport, she is to make arrangements for him to meet someone senior in the Indonesian police, with a view to “mutually beneficial information sharing.” I am staring open-mouthed while he rummages around. In all my time in District 8, my Colonel has never once left Thailand’s sacred soil. Now Manny arrives and scowls at me before telling him that an interpreter has been located and this person, who is fluent in whatever language they speak down there (Vikorn keeps calling it Indonesian, but both Lieutenant Manhatsirikit and I have our doubts), will meet him at the airport tomorrow. When she has left, he checks his watch. Seven p.m. “We’re going to eat,” he tells me, and presses an autodial number on his mobile to call his driver.