by John Burdett
“Of course,” Vikorn says with a patronizing smile.
The CIA woman—she told me her name is Elizabeth Hatch, but who knows?—nods a thank you. “Al Qaeda killed Mitch Turner because they knew what he was, but we don’t have any record of him contacting them. His few attempts at recruiting down there seem to have been futile. Are we looking at a kidnapping or a recruitment attempt that went wrong? Or are we looking at a sincere attempt to join them, which they didn’t believe in? We were eavesdropping on his communications. He was going through a personal crisis. We need to know what he was thinking, what his true intentions were, minute to minute. You’re the only one we have who might be able to help. And there’s this.”
With marvelous cool she takes a photograph out of her pocket to show to me. I jump, show it to Vikorn, who also jumps. It is Mitch Turner’s corpse, taken after they turned him over, clearly showing the bloody mass of skinless flesh where someone flayed him.
She’s played her trump card with considerable finesse, without a touch of triumphalism. In a level, glacial tone: “Don’t ask me how I obtained it, and I won’t ask you why you suppressed it.” She looks at the pic curiously. “I don’t know why you did that, exactly. It does rather complicate the whole thing doesn’t it?” Nodding at me. “Perhaps that will do for now. You are our man in the field, I think you’ll be wanting to go south again soon. Would a written report be feasible this time? If your Colonel doesn’t mind, I would like you to report to me directly.”
“Do I have to do this?” I ask Vikorn.
He nods reluctantly. “It’s a deal. They’ve promised to leave Chanya alone, so long as we play ball.”
That night, before going to bed, I smoke a big fat spliff, kneel before the Buddha image that I keep on a shelf in my hovel, and form an intention to contact my dead soul brother Pichai. Everyone’s personal rituals are hedged about with idiosyncrasies and customized talismans, which I won’t go into. Casting aside all padding, my appeal to Pichai’s superior forensic insight could be translated: Where the fuck do I go from here?
Sure enough, that night he comes to me exuding his usual golden glow. We stand together on a high mountain over which clouds are passing at amazing speed. There is a cosmic roar in the background caused by the intense energy of this location. Pichai points to a cloud formation, which immediately takes on the crescent shape of a gigantic beaked fish leaping over a wave. Pichai is urgently trying to tell me something, but his voice is drowned by the roar of the universe . . .
Next morning I make Chanya stand before me in one of our upstairs humping rooms, stripped to the waist. I do not resist the temptation to handle her left breast, over which that particularly elegant dolphin continuously jumps.
“Where did you get it?”
She shakes her head petulantly. “I’m not telling you.”
I rub her nipple between thumb and forefinger as if it were money, causing it to swell under the dolphin. “The workmanship is fantastic.”
She pushes me away. “Get lost.”
“If I don’t find out who really killed Mitch Turner, those morons will start another war.”
“I said get lost.”
Well, maybe it wasn’t Chanya’s dolphin Pichai had in mind. Maybe it wasn’t a dolphin at all, but it’s the only lead I’ve got.
SIX
Tattoo
33
Bored with Pisit today, I switch to our public radio channel, where the renowned and deeply reverend Phra Titapika is lecturing on Dependent Origination. Not everyone’s cup of chocolate, I agree (this is not the most popular show in Thailand), but the doctrine is at the heart of Buddhism. You see, dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of hubris, it is also proof (if any were needed) that we are above all a delusional species. (We are in a trance from birth to death.) Prick the balloon, and what do you get? Emptiness. It’s not only us—this radical doctrine applies to the whole of the sentient world. In a bumper sticker: The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go. Here’s the good Phra in fine fettle today: “Take a snail, for example. Consider what brooding overweening self-centered passion got it into that state. Can you see the rage of a snail? The frustration of a cockroach? The ego of an ant? If you can, then you are close to enlightenment.”
Like I say, not everyone’s cup of miso. Come to think of it, I do believe I prefer Pisit, but the Phra does have a point: take two steps in the divine art of Buddhist meditation, and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very bones of your being turn out to be no more than bugs in your software. (Even the certainty of death gets nuanced.) You’ll find no meaning there. So where? Ah!
Back to the case.
Where does a smart man hide a leaf? the great Sherlock Holmes once asked. In a forest, of course. Where does a smart detective start looking for a talented tattooist with the eye of a Zen watercolorist? Not in Songai Kolok, that’s for sure. Soi 39, Sukhumvit might be a better bet. The clubs are all Japanese. Since we still enjoy freedom of speech over here, the notices on the door make explicit the management policy of not allowing entry to non-Japanese. I dress up in my Sunday best (it is nine-thirty on a Friday night) and stroll down the street until I come to an elaborate Buddha shrine bedecked with marigolds. I raise my hands in a wai and silently ask for guidance.
Trying for maximum emptiness, I stroll up and down the street a few times, then, guided by nothing at all (always the most reliable source), knock on a scarlet front door. A hatch opens, an overdressed Thai mamasan scowls, and I explain why it is in her and her boss’s interest to let me in. She tends to agree.
Within minutes I am in one of those hybrid sets so beloved of the pornography industry: dungeon from de Sade, papier-mâché rock formations (with plastic chains) from Disney, costumes from Geisha (let me be frank, our girls don’t wear them that well—they tend to resent the restrictions), whores from Isaan. I am led discreetly to the back of the club, where I discreetly observe the various states of passionate undress of both customers and girls on the benches all around.
The girl chained to the papier-mâché rock (a dragon lurks in a hole nearby) is quite naked and trying not to look bored while they whip her and drop hot wax onto her breasts. She smiles at me with a face serenely incapable of debauchery (she will sell mangoes from a market stall tomorrow with exactly the same happy smile) and with her eyes asks if I want her. I am about to signal no when I notice the serpent coiled around her navel. The club is gloomy, too gloomy to examine a work of such quality. Confident that I am not the first to make the request, I call for illumination. The mamasan obliges with a flashlight (Hitachi, rechargeable battery). Up close and without the need for a magnifying glass, I confirm my deepest forensic suspicions: this is a very superior snake: emerald green scales of variegated shades, an ink-blue forked tongue ravishing her belly button, brilliantly designed wings. (Not the huge clumsy things you see Saint George grappling with, but the delicate, diaphanous propellants of Oriental myth: I know I’m on to something here.) I demand that the damsel be released from her bonds immediately.
Once I confirm that I am willing to pay, the girl, whose name is Dao, slips out of her chains witho
ut need for assistance. She recognizes no social imperative to put any clothes on, so now she and I are sitting on a padded bench at the far end of the club, situated not far from other benches with other bodies in perpetual motion. The mamasan would clearly be happier if I conducted my interrogation while at least going through the motions of seduction, and Dao rescues me from professional restraints by taking my right hand and cupping it over her left breast, where I gently pull off the wax flakes. She checks my cock to see if her body is having the usual commercially desirable effect on my body (no comment), while I whisper my question lyrically into her right ear: Where in Thailand did she get such a marvelous tattoo?
She smiles gratefully, as if I have complimented her on a new dress, and reveals there is another. Kneeling on the bench and turning her back to me, I see that a couple of dragons (lightly done with considerable humor, hardly more substantial than clouds, masterpieces of the body artist’s craft—if I were to have dragons competing for my private parts, I would certainly choose these) are fighting for possession of the dark prize. “Fantastic,” I confirm as she happily straddles me and places my left hand directly on her vagina, which she informs me, in case I hadn’t noticed, is quite wet.
“But the tattoos?”
“Stroke me and tell me what you want me to do. I work much better when I’m horny.”
There is (let’s face it) a primeval signal sent to all parts of the male nervous system when direct contact is made in this way. It’s quite a wrench to pull consciousness out of the crotch area and shove it a little higher up the spine.
“It’s okay, you can fuck me here if you want. The boss is a rich Japanese—he pays off the police. We can do anything you like.”
“But the tattoo?”
“Ask me while we’re doing it. You’ve got me really horny.”
“I can’t—I’m shy.”
“Oh, you want to take me somewhere?”
“No, I . . . I can’t get it up.”
“You kidding? That’s one hell of a stalk.”
“I like to just pretend.”
Disappointed: “Oh.”
“Just go through the motions. That’s right.”
“What turns you on?”
“If you would just talk about the tattoos, that would be great. I’ll pay you just the same as if we were doing it.”
“Tattoos, huh? And you’re not even Japanese. A customer made me have them,” she confesses into my ear, working her loins with a feline motion I’m rather fond of. “He was Japanese, of course. He said he liked my body, but I was too naked without tattoos. He said he would want me much more if I had them, and then he’d pay me double, so I said okay. It worked. Without the tattoos he hardly lasted more than a couple of minutes. With them he could go on and on for ages. Every time he got tired, he would make me stand up so he could study them again and get horny. He said they were the best he’d seen outside of Japan—the guy who did it was a master.”
“What was his name?”
“You like the dragon who is licking my cunt from behind?”
“Very much.”
“That one took ages. He had to come back every day for a week. He sort of sketched it out first, then did the coloring. He had to be really careful—you know, to avoid infection.”
“Was it painful?”
“Not too much. He used some long Japanese bamboo needles that he had a special name for. I was terrified, but actually he was very gentle. He sort of turned me on in a weird way.”
“What was his name?”
“The customer?”
“No, the tattooist.”
“Can’t remember. Ishy something? Ikishy? Witakashi? Or maybe it was Yamamoto—I really can’t remember. Can you talk dirty some more? I’m losing concentration.”
“What was the customer’s name?”
“Maybe Honda. Or Toshiba.”
“Okay, you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay.”
“Them’s the rules. Talk dirty, will you?”
Talk dirty? Oddly enough, considering my vocation, this is not an art I have ever had occasion to master. Furthermore, ever since my incarnation in the great Buddhist university of Nalanda, sex has often taken me in an odd way. With all due respect, farang, I have to say you’ve wasted the past two thousand years with your weird tendency to suppress it. That was never the purpose of celibacy; no sir, au contraire, the point is sublimation. Stoke up that fire, build it into an intolerable heat, a boiling cauldron of unendurable intensity, then let it take you up through the chakras all the way to the thousand-petaled lotus in the head. I always think about mathematics at this stage—Buddhist mathematics, of course. At Nalanda it took me only five short lifetimes to work my way up from slopping-out-untouchable to the abbot’s favorite disciple. With the Mogul hordes clamoring at the gates and slaughtering monks all over India, five of us worked serenely to restore the zero to its pre-Vedic dignity as the numerical symbol of nirvana (it is the number of om, if that helps); as such it not only represents Nothing (an obvious enough discovery, hardly worth all the credit the Arabs demand for stealing it from us) but also Everything and, naturally, every shade of value between those two extremes. My discovery was that when trapped in an equation, so to speak, it constantly changed value, thus solving the problem and re-creating it at the speed of thought. Transcendental math may not be much use for the household budget, but it remains the essence of narrative.
“What was that you were whispering?” Dao wants to know.
“Nothing. Everything.”
“You’re a romantic? I haven’t had a romantic client for ages. Would you like to have me with another girl? Do you have a wife? You could take turns dominating me.”
“I’m not married.”
“Or with another man—I like that. You can exploit me with both your cocks at the same time. It wouldn’t cost double—say, fifty percent more than for one.”
“Did he have a shop?”
“Who?”
“The tattooist.”
“No, he came to my customer’s condominium every time. There was something special about him, you know, he wouldn’t have had a shop.”
“What was special?”
“What are you thinking about now?”
“Om.”
“That’s your wife’s name?”
“I told you I’m not married. Did he tattoo any of the other girls?”
“No. He was sort of special for my customer. All the other Japanese men were jealous when they saw my tats, but he wouldn’t say who did them. They really turn you on, don’t they?”
“Umm.”
“Tell you what. Carry me over to the other bench, then you can look at them in the mirror.”
Why do I get the feeling she’s done this before? I note with forensic zeal that as she works her buttocks the two dragons, now in full view thanks to the mirror, are performing a kind of dance, a systole and diastole, clearly a reference to the inhalation and exhalation of the cosmos.
Dao, breathless, slowly eases herself off me. “Look at me, I’m sweating. You got me all worked up, and you haven’t even opened your fly.”
“Sorry, I was sublimating. Just sit on my knee so I can check your belly dragon again. I really would like to have one like that. It’s amazing the way it keeps its integrity even when you’re doubled over.”
“You want me to try to find him?”
“Could you? Do you have anything to go on?”
“The customer went with another girl—someone called Du. She hangs out at the Rose Garden. I heard he made her have a tat from the same guy. That was before me, though—he dumped her because she hit twenty-seven. Those Japs don’t like old ladies.”
“You must at least be able to remember what his tattoos were like.”
“The tattooist? Oh yeah, that’s easy. No tattoos on hands, face, or feet. The rest, well, you know, total body. He was like a walking comic strip, no part of him left uncolored. He liked to work in just a pair of shorts, so I saw everythin
g. Then one day I asked if I could see him naked, so he dropped his pants. I tell you, his body surface was ninety percent ink.”
“His cock, too?”
“Especially that. He told me that when it was hard, you could see some famous Japanese naval battle with the Americans, but I only saw it all small and wrinkled. It wasn’t such a big one. I told him he could have me for two thousand baht if he wanted, and I wouldn’t tell the john, but he said he didn’t like women that way. I just wanted to see the naval battle.”
“He’s gay?”
“He didn’t say that. He just said he didn’t do it with women. You know how weird Japs can be.”
“Anything else?”
“He had this dreadful stutter. At first I thought he couldn’t speak Thai at all, but then I realized he was fluent, except for the stutter. He seemed incredibly shy, like he’d been working in the jungle all his life and didn’t know how to relate to people.”
34
Rose Garden: the women here are all freelancers. You could say the semiliterate Thai owners of the bar showed the kind of commercial foresight for which business school graduates pray: they decided to allow single women to sit at the bar or at the tables all day and most of the night for the price of a single coffee or an orange juice. The standard travel books duly warned of a small army of impecunious, unscrupulous whores—not all of them young, either—not disciplined by employers or pimps, untraceable and unaccountable should the john wake up in his hotel room in the middle of the night to find both woman and wallet gone. Naturally, the result was a somewhat larger army of curious farang men who spent a great deal of money buying themselves and the women drinks in their earnest desire to find out just how unscrupulous these girls really were. Within a couple of years the result was a roaringly successful cooperative enterprise housed in a barnlike compound upon which the owners lavish nothing in the way of decor, although the Buddha shrine is one of the largest in the entertainment industry.