by John Burdett
At about ten in the morning I woke up in a panic from an alcoholic coma. In my dream Pichai had come to me again: Why didn’t you arrest the donburi?
Staring wide-eyed into cosmic darkness: He got me drunk. I think it was the tattoos. Who in hell is he?
Pichai’s voice cracked up as with a defective satellite connection: Renegade . . . naga in human form . . . Nalanda . . . way back . . . tattoos . . . powerful magic . . . try decoy—stakeout . . .
From my bed, head splitting with the worst hangover I can remember, I called the Japanese restaurant. Only the cleaning staff were on duty. Using Intimidating Voice, I persuaded the woman who answered the phone to get me the boss’s home number. When I rang him, he denied knowing anyone called Ishy. No, he had never met a Japanese of that bizarre description—was I sure I had the right restaurant?
36
Now you find me in familiar mode, farang, sitting in front of a computer monitor in my favorite Internet café, scrolling through various entries in the online version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You need not feel inferior, I don’t know what the hell ukiyo-e is either. Here we are: These depicted aspects of the entertainment quarters (euphemistically called the “floating world”) of Edo (modern Tokyo) and other urban centers. Common subjects included famous courtesans and prostitutes, kabuki actors and well-known scenes from kabuki plays, and erotica. Ukiyo-e artists were the first to exploit the medium of woodblocks.
The coincidence strikes me as almost grotesquely literary. Now Vikorn calls me on my mobile. I am summoned to the police station, where I am ushered into Vikorn’s office. Hudson is there, somewhat wild-eyed, pacing up and down. The impression of a mind unraveling is quite strong. Or to be more accurate, the Alien Within is clearly taking over. I suspect an Andromedan, although I’m not an expert.
“Progress?” Hudson asks.
I tell a tall tale of tattoos and whores, a drunken night with Hokusai’s posthumous apprentice, the effect that the two words Mitch Turner seemed to have, although in the circumstances it was hard to be sure.
“I need the Islamic connection,” Hudson barks, staring at Vikorn. “That bitch is gonna have all our balls if she finds out about that little trip of yours to Indonesia.” Swallowing: “I also want that fucking laptop.”
Vikorn is hard to read at this moment. Is he actually intimidated by Hudson, or is he merely being obliging? My intuition discards both possibilities. Something is going on here, some drama long suppressed reaching back to before I was born. Vietnam/Laos: what is my karma here? My father? It is disturbingly easy to see Hudson as the source of the seed that became me, even though he is not Mike Smith. As Hudson turns his gaze to me, Vikorn stares at Hudson in a way I’ve never seen before.
“Forget the fucking tattoos,” Hudson is saying. “Forget the whole Japanese connection. It’s a red herring. Follow the Islamic trail. No Victory but Allah’s.” He hesitates for a moment, then recites what I take to be the original words from the Koran in Arabic. To me his accent sounds impeccable; there is relish in the guttural tones. Defensively (catching the look on my face): “I’m a good American, I’m entitled to my schizophrenia.”
He paces, goes to the window again, stares out, then begins to speak in that narrative voice that might belong to a different man, or at least an earlier version of this one. There is heavy metal in the midtones.
“Most people don’t stay in the Agency very long. It’s like any other job in the States—Americans get restless, bored, enraged that their talents are not properly appreciated. We move on. We move on—change the view every ten minutes, and you can convince yourself for a while that you’ve escaped the treadmill. But not forever. After a certain specific moment in life, you start to look back. You discern a pattern. Something ugly, manic, cramped, tortured, and repetitive. That pattern is what you are, what your culture has made of you. But that’s not a reason for giving up. It’s not a reason for becoming a Mitch Turner. It’s not a reason for changing sides. You got to soldier on, right or wrong. How you ever gonna know how wrong you are, how you ever gonna learn your life’s lesson, if you’re just a feather in the wind? You gotta suck it all up—there’s no other way.”
He resumes his seat as if nothing unusual has happened. “I want you to go back down south. Stop frigging around with mad Japs and crazy Bangkok whores. Stay there for a month, a year if you have to.” He passes a hand over his spiky short hair as if to enforce patience. “And I want that fucking laptop.” Another pause, then: “Before she gets it.”
I raise my eyes to Vikorn, who nods.
But I really don’t want to go back down south on a wild-goose chase. A brief prayer to the Buddha does the trick. I have no sooner stuck the incense in the sandbox than my mobile starts twanging.
37
That’s exactly how I found him when I came this morning,” Nat whispers, hoarse with horror, sharing wide eyes with Lek (to whom I had to talk sternly before he would get out of bed; he apologized in the cab, the estrogen is upsetting his system, he’s starting to feel moody even though his nascent breasts are hardly noticeable). “I stayed with him every weekend. He gave me a key.” She shows me.
We are standing in a rented two-room apartment on Soi 22, Sukhumvit. Stephen Bright had a beautiful body; its youth and sinewy texture are apparent still even though its internal organization has already failed. At this very moment cell walls are breaking down, bacteria are burrowing into previously forbidden zones, the composite has lost all integrity. The entity that played Bright for twenty-seven years is frankly relieved to be rid of its chemical prison and at the moment of writing is having a lot more fun in a gentler, kinder galaxy. He did all he could to avoid yet another early death by violence but, having performed his duty as he saw it, now looks forward to a long period of rest and recreation. He hasn’t totally rejected our solar system but will probably favor Venus for his next visit. Looking at it with terrestrial eyes, though, his body, minus the penis (discarded in a cheap wastepaper bin), with a great gaping gash in his gut, purple tubes hanging out like bunches of grapes—well, what can one say? It’s a mess. This time I am the one to turn the corpse over. Yep, afraid so.
Lek covers his mouth, shares another very female glance of terminal terror with Nat, then finds a carpet to kneel on while he wais the Buddha. Seeing this, Nat immediately joins him. (Over here it’s not death but the dead who send the green balls down our trouser legs. Believe me, there’s nothing more depressing than a clinging ghost on your back for life.) I wait while the two of them, palms joined in high wais, silently inoculate themselves with a potent mixture of magic, superstition, and customized Buddhism. Nat is the first to stand up, followed by Lek, who cannot resist a second glance into the wastepaper bin. He involuntarily touches his crotch area. (I’ve resisted this reflex myself, but only just.) Nat reads his mind. “It’s different for you—they’ll use an anesthetic, and anyway you don’t need yours.”
“I’ve always hated it,” Lek agrees, “but I’m used to it, you know?”
I am watching Nat closely. The horror is genuine. So is the sorrow. She catches my eye. “Stephen Bright proposed to me a couple of nights ago. I thought maybe I’d finally got lucky. I mean, he was a serious boy, and I think he actually loved me. He’d suffered so much, you know, and he was always so grateful when we made love. He said I was a very generous lover. Actually, I didn’t do anything I didn’t do with other customers—he was just so grateful all the time.” She bursts into tears.
“His back?”
She shudders. “That was my fault. I have this thing about tats, you know, and I kept asking him, wouldn’t he like something on his back? He said he’d look into it. Then one night he surprised me with it. It went all the way from his shoulders to the top of his backside. It wasn’t at all what I expected but it was amazing, I mean really superior.”
“Did he tell you who did it?”
“He said it was a Japanese who was known to the intelligence community. That’s all he said.”
I have decided to bypass Hudson, not out of mistrust—his commitment to the meaningless is surely unimpeachable—but because I don’t think I can quite stand his Arabic at this moment. The female CIA seems an oasis of sanity in comparison.
“Hello?”
“It’s me, Detective Jitpleecheep.”
“Yes, Detective?”
“You’d better come.” I give her the address, then I tell Nat to take Lek back to the club. She puts her arm around him in a sisterly gesture, hugs him.
“I don’t know if I’m really going to go through with it,” Lek moans as they leave. “Maybe I’ll just use tape. Lots of dancers do.”
“You really want to be half and half all your life?” Nat asks gently at the door.
“No.”
The female CIA arrives, with Hudson. I watch her while she stares silently for several minutes at Bright’s corpse; were she not a seasoned professional, I would describe the succession of expressions on her face as emanating from deep prurience. She composes herself eventually; it’s like watching someone get dressed after an orgy: “You see, they severed his penis, just as we suspected they would. And look at his back.”
Hudson and I follow her directions. There is hardly any difference between him and Mitch Turner in this respect—the whole of the top layer of skin has been peeled away, from shoulders to lower back, leaving the subcutaneous blubber to seep.
“Well, at least we don’t need a homicide detective to tell us these deaths are linked.” She looks at Hudson. “But the ones who assassinated Mitch Turner died in that explosion in Indonesia, am I correct? So this is a brilliantly coordinated, centrally planned, high-level Al Qaeda atrocity: different hitmen deliberately copying the first murder, so as to demonstrate corporate identity. The intention is to intimidate all Americans everywhere.” Biting her lower lip: “This is big. Much bigger than I thought. It’s the psychology of terrorism honed to a remarkable level of sophistication. If this gets out, Americans will be more afraid than ever to travel overseas. If these kinds of killings show up in the States, as I’m sure they will sooner or later, the whole of the American mind will be held for ransom. It’s brilliant, it’s evil.” To me: “Any crinkly black hairs? I want the best forensic investigation you can manage on this apartment. If you need any special support—for example, a kit to lift prints off flesh, analysis of microscopic fiber samples—let me know. I’ll have them ship whatever you need with some skilled operators on the next plane.” Looking curiously at Hudson: “This really is starting to look like war.”
Hudson stiffens at this holy word.
An hour later Vikorn and I are standing together in Bright’s apartment. The situation, as much as the corpse, has begun to give me a headache.
“I just don’t see any way out of it,” I tell him.
Vikorn is strangely unperturbed. “It’s okay. I still have a few of those hairs left. No fingers, unfortunately.”
“Are you crazy? Those hairs belong to a terrorist who’s known to have been killed before the murder. You’ll blow the whole scam.”
He shakes his head at my obtuseness and at the same time takes an airmail envelope out of his pocket. He rips it open and begins shaking it around the room. Crinkly hairs fall out like black snow.
“You’ll never understand them. You present dedicated farang with contradictory evidence, and they’ll use their infinite ingenuity to mislead themselves even further.”
38
Elizabeth Hatch has summoned me to a private evening interview, and here I am in the back of a cab on the way to the Sheraton on Sukhumvit. In a jam at the intersection between Silom and Rama IV, opposite Lumpini Park, the driver and I listen to Pisit, who has been on the rampage all day, having finally woken up to the injustice in the way the government has ordered the police to slaughter about two thousand presumed drug traffickers, on a quota basis. The problem, as Pisit sees it: How do we know any of these people had anything to do with drug trafficking in the first place? Isn’t that what trials are for? And isn’t it a strange coincidence that all of them are small-time dealers, if they are dealers at all? Shouldn’t a crackdown on drug trafficking at least try to include the kingpins? He’s found a retired Crime Suppression Division officer to interview.
Pisit: Why aren’t any jao por—kingpins—included in the slaughter?
Former cop: Excuse me for saying so, but that is not a very intelligent question. If it was possible to simply kill jao por, their enemies would have done so ages ago. By definition it is very difficult to kill jao por.
Pisit: So the government has taken an executive decision to kill non–jao por and suppress crime the easy way?
Former cop: It’s logical isn’t it?
Pisit: Might we take the logic one stage further and have the cops kill people with no connection to crime at all?
Former cop: Are you trying to be clever?
Pisit: No.
Former cop, after ruminative silence: Actually, that’s probably exactly what’s happening. After all, if all you need is the appearance of a crackdown, it doesn’t really matter who you kill.
Pisit: You mean this is government-by-spin Thai-style?
Former cop: You could say that.
I am curious that the CIA has chosen the hour of nine p.m. to see me. Still more interesting is the way she is dressed: a splendid navy trouser suit by Versace with white lace blouse. I find it shocking that her wrists are a-wobble with elephant-hair bracelets, and she has discreetly dyed her hair a couple shades darker. The lipstick—wet-look crimson, thinly applied—perhaps gives the game away, along with a haunting perfume by Kenzo. Is there a single CIA officer who will not reincarnate as a chameleon?
“I felt the need for some on-the-ground experience,” she explains when she meets me in the lobby. “One must resist isolation on this kind of case.”
“Dancing?”
A quick look: “Is that your recommendation?”
“Traditional Thai?”
“Perhaps not.”
I follow her trail of hints from the girls in bikinis dancing around aluminum poles in Nana Plaza, to the topless ones at the Firehouse on Soi Cowboy, to the naked ones at the Purple Pussycat, also on Cowboy, until we finally reach the upstairs bars in Pat Pong. It is dark in this club except for the pool of light where the star of the show is performing her act.
I’ve seen the banana show too many times not to be bored. Elizabeth Hatch is riveted. Suddenly, in a whisper, as if she wants to bond with me, or perhaps reward me for indulging her tonight: “One bomb in this place will be all the message they need: support America, and we’ll break your economy. You don’t have the intelligence operators or the security forces to protect your country, and we can’t protect you either. So what kind of ally are we?” A thin, pitying smile followed by a prudish tone: “Are those really razor blades? I read about that in one of the guidebooks, but I didn’t believe it. How on earth does she do that without cutting herself to ribbons?”
“It’s a trade secret. D’you want me to call the mamasan over?”
“Let her finish. That is one very beautiful body.”
Discreetly I beckon to the mamasan and whisper to her in Thai while the CIA studies the show. Even in Pat Pong not every girl zigzags, and I want Elizabeth Hatch on my side. The mamasan suggests a figure, though, that few girls would say no to. I tell the CIA, who nods. When the girl finishes her act, I watch the mamasan speak to her and catch the bright flash of curiosity that she casts at Elizabeth, the seductive smile. Elizabeth smiles back recklessly. As soon as she has dressed, the girl comes over to us, sits next to Elizabeth, and rests her head on the CIA’s shoulder.
I say: “Shall I go now?”
In a lust-thick tone: “Just ask her, if you wouldn’t mind, if there’s anything she doesn’t do?”
A brief discussion between me and the girl in Thai. “No, there’s nothing she doesn’t do. Don’t hurt her.”
She snaps her head around to face me. “Did you say that
because I’m American, or because I’m female, or because I’m gay?”
“I always say the same thing to men,” I reply with a smile.
The three of us leave together. I find Elizabeth a taxi and watch her disappear into the back with her trophy. They are moving away when all of a sudden she makes the driver stop, and she rolls down her window in back. Beckoning to me, then holding my arm when I’m close enough: “I appreciate this. I confess I’m not proud of what I’m doing.” A pause. “I need air.”
I smile: “I understand.”
As she rolls up the window: “This is not what I generally do.”
The girl beside her, now dressed in a low-cut black silk blouse and short white skirt that reveals her long brown legs, searches my eyes: Problem? I shake my head. No problem, just another gasping, life-starved farang. The taxi moves off.
It’s one-fifteen a.m., which is to say forty-five minutes before the curfew. The street is alive with bodies already half conjoined on their way to the hotels all around. There are a few Western women with local girls, but the vast majority of the trade is heterosexual. Pat Pong is only a couple minutes’ walk from the gay bars on the other side of Surawong, however. In the Grand Finale Club the format is much the same as in Pat Pong, except that the people on stage are all men. Most of them, in underpants, are late teens, early twenties, but quite a few are older, harder, tougher. And tattoos are everywhere.
I walk across the street to a gothic black door encrusted with nails that forms the almost-discreet entrance to the No Name Bar, a resort so sought after and so exclusive it never needs to advertise. You don’t get to simply walk in without introduction, either. A child of the street knows the formula, though, and the burly, tattooed doorman lets me through.