by John Burdett
“Dolphins are old,” sneered Chanya when he reappeared. He grunted, but the next time he emerged from the bedroom, he brought a sketch of the most beautiful dolphin she had ever seen. The proportions were entirely consistent with her charms. Now, in between the long sessions with Mitch, Ishy worked on her bosom while she sat in a chair. She was astonished at the gentleness of his touch, embarrassed by the swelling of her nipples, enthralled by this guided missile of ruthless concentration. She had not realized how erotic male passion could be when raised above the level of sex. Or how elusive. She found herself exaggerating the pain a little. He ordered her to cup a hand underneath her left breast to keep it firm: “You’re not hurting that much. Tits are not so sensitive except near the nipple. It’s mostly just fatty tissue.”
By the end of the week Mitch’s tattoo was finished, and she and Ishy had become lovers. What can one say? The sexual preferences of prostitutes can be eccentric, I of all people should know that. She was ashamed of herself, ashamed to betray Mitch in this way, but what could she do? Mitch was a prisoner of a million rules and regulations, most of them contradictory; Ishy was a wild thing who knew no rules, not even of conversation. In terms of raw sex appeal there was no contest. And then there was the donburi, that outrageous and indelible challenge to the universe. The abused and desecrated skin that had appalled her at the beginning of the week was exercising a mesmeric appeal by the end. As a lover he was extraordinarily feline; the flashes of intense color when he paid silent homage to her body burned into her mind long after he had left her. Every night she dreamed of gigantic, vividly colored nagas: snake gods who possess an almost unendurable sensuality. Every day when they coupled again, she thought of the American lying in a trance in the other bedroom, exactly as if she and Ishy were protagonists in his erotic opium dreams.
For the first time the balance of passion lay in her heart. When Ishy returned to Bangkok, she ached for him. She convinced herself that he needed her, that she alone with her street wisdom and undefeatable toughness could save this lost man-child who stumbled through life under the burden of a gigantic talent. But he did not reply to her text messages or her e-mails. This was a first. It had never occurred to her that when she finally fell for a man in this way, he might not respond. She went through the hackneyed stages of volcanic yearning, fury, a quaking in her guts, a sense of loss of power, and a conviction that his lack of response was connected to the onset of her third decade and/or her unsavory profession.
Her final attempt to contact her beloved consisted of a telephonic text message of the kind he favored: Y the F don’t U kal? There was no electronic response, but a few days later an envelope arrived with a single sheet of paper. In the most elegant tradition of Thai calligraphy, a single sentence:
Because I am not worthy of you.
In addition to the single sheet of paper, Ishy included the last segment of his remaining pinkie. The sly reference to a certain Dutch impressionist was entirely lost on her, but not the message. Now she was ashamed for a different reason: she found her passion quite bourgeois compared to his. This great artist would sacrifice his hands for her. All she had done was yearn and groan. Thumbing the message feverishly into her mobile, she freed her heart from all restraints and resorted to the vocabulary of Oriental extravagance: I would give both my I’s to see U again.
Ishy: U don’t No what U ask.
Chanya: I don’t kare. I want U.
With apparent reluctance Ishy agreed to see her in Bangkok, not in his home—which remained mysteriously anonymous—but in a bar on Sukhumvit. Finding his attitude incomprehensible and therefore all the more alluring, she arrived early, drank three tequilas to steady her nerves, and had no idea what to do about the great quaking in her stomach when the bashful genius walked awkwardly into the bar, ordered sake, and sat next to her. What could possibly be the matter? His eyes were on fire with desire for her, but he refused to take her to his apartment. He tried to explain, but his stutter was worse than ever and quite incomprehensible. Only after he had consumed three bottles of sake could she begin to understand what he was saying, but by then they were both too horny for words.
“I know a short-time hotel around the corner,” she confided.
“I don’t have any money.”
Eagerly: “Don’t worry, I’ll pay.”
In the heavily mirrored room, which was encumbered by the obscenity of a gynecological chair to serve those perversions that require it, she laid him on the bed and covered him and his outrageous tattoos with her flawless body, made him her own in the way so many men had done to her—or tried to. Now for the first time in her life she understood men and their need to possess in a total way through the act of sex. (She finally understood Mitch.)
She could not recall for how long they made love—it seemed to go on all afternoon. From time to time she sent out for warm sake for him, cold beer for her. It seemed they were satisfying a hunger accumulated over lifetimes. When their passion finally began to ebb, they switched on the TV monitor, which automatically played a hard porn video. Finally sated, with him drunk enough to lose his stutter, he talked as they lay on their backs, staring at their bodies in the ceiling mirror. What she saw there was a woman lying naked next to an extraterrestrial. She could not say why she found comfort in this juxtaposition, except that he seemed the male expression of herself at that moment; after all, for her as for him, there was no society of human beings worth belonging to, merely a torn cobweb of hypocrisy best avoided.
Ishy explained: Only through his work could he escape for a moment from his appalling sense of inadequacy, which stemmed from that lifelong problem with people. But what happened when there was no work, as was often the case? If he did not work for more than a day, he began to suffer mental torture of the most excruciating kind, a sense of suffocation—worse, of annihilation. His very existence was thoughtlessly eclipsed by people happily chatting together, by the merest glimpse of that effortless camaraderie to which Thais—especially our women—are particularly prone. Two old ladies nattering could send him into a jealous rage. (He was capable of envy provoked by the mutual grooming of cats.) His sense of isolation was of a degree no human should have to endure. He experienced the insane need to tattoo everyone around him, that they might carry proof of his existence all the way to the grave. After more than two days without work his mind filled with violent fantasies. On the inside of his skull, just above the eyes, cartoons of extreme sadism, murder, and death played out. There was only one activity that in its intensity could replace the solace of creativity.
“What’s that?” Chanya asked, fearing the answer.
“Gambling.”
“Gambling?” She almost giggled. She had suspected something far worse.
But as Ishy explained it, she realized this was not a vice to be taken lightly. The reason he spoke Thai so well, at least when drunk, was that he spent most of his time and all of his money at boxing contests, cockfights, horse races, and even cockroach races in cardboard cities under bridges among the city’s derelicts. To finance his vice, he borrowed from loan sharks, who were invariably of Chiu Chow origin, specifically the Swatow area south of Shanghai, which has been home to the Pacific Rim’s greatest financiers and thugs for a thousand years. His life hung permanently by a thread as he struggled to pay off one bloodthirsty gangster by borrowing from another. At the present moment he owed not less than a million U.S. dollars, most of it due to some Japanese financiers who saved him from mutilation at the hands of the Chiu Chow only by securing his agreement to a particularly onerous contract.
“So what does the contract say?”
“Don’t ask,” he replied. “Just don’t ask.”
Even in the grip of her passion, she saw the point. Everyone in Thailand knew about the Chiu Chow loan sharks, and she doubted the Japanese were much more humane. If they discovered a love in his life, she would become leverage; they would do to her whatever they thought necessary to squeeze more money out of Ishy. In his ma
d attempt to save his mind, he had mortgaged his life.
“Not only my life,” Ishy replied with an ironic twist of his lips.
Desperate, Chanya found herself arguing exactly like a man: “But we could still do this from time to time, meet somewhere safe, go to a hotel, be together for a few hours?”
Ishy shook his head. The people on his tail were ruthless and extremely good at what they did. He could not risk it. He simply could not bear to think of what they would do to her. The steps he took to cover his trail today had been elaborate to the point of baroque, but still he could not afford to feel secure. This was their last moment together. He was resolute, unshakable. He would go to the grave with the comfort that at least he’d managed to protect her.
Chanya is looking at me with the shrewd eyes of a woman who has experienced every shade of male jealousy. I lick my lips and swallow to cure the dryness in my throat. “It’s okay,” I croak. “I’m okay.”
“What d’you think? What’s going on in your heart right now?”
“Actually, I’m thinking about Mitch Turner.”
44
I’m surprised at how often I do think of him (whoever he was). There was no real malice in him, he never once used those formidable muscles in anger, and even his savage words in moments of fury with the woman he loved were mostly an expression of bewilderment: how did he fall for a girl like that anyway? But I think of him mostly because he wants me to. Last night I saw him as a Superman figure, trapped in a cube of deadly kryptonite, unable to use his strength, for he dared not touch the walls. But that, it turned out, was no more than a reflection of my own prejudice. A second later he was a humble fellow in T-shirt and jeans, smiling gently at my folly. Your back! I exclaimed. He pulled up his shirt and turned: a rectangle in the form of a picture frame, within which foreign words were written in a code I could never decipher. He shrugged: it didn’t matter to him anymore, he was merely trying to help me with the case.
I’m on the back of a motorbike again, playing Pisit’s talk show through my earphones while we weave in and out of the static commuter traffic. (Cars, buses, and trucks are the only objects not subject to the law of constant movement in this Buddhist city.) Chanya was fast asleep in our love den when I left her in response to Vikorn’s call: another T808. The old man finally seemed to be worried about something.
Well, Pisit is having a field day with the story of the abbot in Nonthaburi who had more than a hundred million baht in his bank account when he was gunned down last week. He quotes from The Nation’s short bio of the deceased monk: Thanks to his cleverness and knowledge of magic he quickly rose in the Sangha and was appointed abbot when he was thirty-seven years old.
Pisit, to Sangha spokesman: Is it common for ambitious monks to use magic as a promotion aid?
Spokesperson: Unfortunately, meditation brings many powers that are vulnerable to abuse.
Pisit: You mean like purple rain? Or hundreds of millions of baht?
Spokesperson: Buddhism has been fighting sorcery for two thousand five hundred years. Generally, we have an excellent success rate, but a few miscreants still slip through.
Pisit: The magic in this case seems to have worked through the mundane medium of drugs and sex. The rumor has it that the abbot was murdered because he double-crossed a certain army general.
Spokesman: Sorcery carries a heavy karmic price.
Pisit: Almost every Thai man learns to meditate in his early twenties. How much sorcery do you think we generate in this kingdom? I mean, how many of our most prominent figures in business and politics have got where they are today using dark powers?
Spokesman: We don’t have any statistics.
Pisit: But if you were to hazard a guess?
Spokesman: All of them.
The destination this merry morning is a magnificent mansion off Soi 22, Sukhumvit. Vikorn sits in the kitchen flirting with an attractive Thai woman in her mid-twenties while a corpse waits in the living room. Blood has flooded the capillaries in my Colonel’s face, which has acquired an obscene beam. He introduces his companion as Nok, and I can tell by the shape her mouth makes when she speaks to me that they have already fixed an assignation.
“You better tell him yourself,” Vikorn says. With a quite disgusting grin at her: “I don’t want to put words in your mouth.”
“I’m the maid here,” Nok says, standing up and leading me out of the kitchen. “When I arrived this morning, I found him like that. Naturally I called the police, and Colonel Vikorn himself arrived.”
The middle-aged Japanese male is naked on the polished pine floor in a crimson lake that has spread in a slow flood over sealed wood. Vikorn wanders in while I’m conducting a perfunctory examination of the corpse. The last segment of pinkie is missing from his left hand, a very old wound. I catch Vikorn’s eye when I turn him over.
Vikorn shakes his head. “You’ll have to stop this. Do whatever you need to do. Don’t arrest him—shoot him while he’s trying to escape. This has to stop.” A shrug. “At least this victim is not American so we don’t have to call the CIA.”
“You’re not going to tell them?”
“I’ve run out of hairs.”
I turn to Nok: “Please tell me what you know.”
“I came to work here a year ago,” Nok explains. “I was recruited by his wife, a Japanese woman with a personality problem. I mean, she never stopped complaining. She was obsessive about the house.” A wave of the hand: “This is all her.”
I take a moment to look around. The place could not be more Japanese: sliding screens of translucent paper, a small nonsymmetrical pool in the middle of the room (in which a severed penis floats) surrounded by pebbles, bonsai in beige glazed pots, and carefully wrinkled natural-colored paper on the walls.
“I had to learn the Japanese names for everything. It took me ages with her bitching at me all the time—the place had to be spotless. Then, just when she had everything perfect, she dumped him and fled back to Japan, said she couldn’t stand Thailand, that we were all primitive, dirty, and revolting. Nips are worse racists than we are.”
“When did she go?”
“About two months ago. It didn’t seem to bother him very much. He had whores back here from time to time.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
Firmly: “No. He asked me to a couple of times, but I said I wasn’t like that.”
“If he’d offered something respectable, like the position of mia noi?”
“Well, he didn’t. He just wanted a cheap screw, and he wasn’t going to pay any more than he paid for his other women, so I said no.”
“You never saw him naked?”
“No.”
“Never saw his back without a shirt?”
“No.”
“Any enemies that you know of?”
Vikorn stands frowning over the cadaver. “Forget it,” he says to me. “This guy was the CEO of the Thai-Nippon Reforestation and Beautification of Isaan Corporation.”
I was bending over the body; now I straighten to stare at him. He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Zinna’s going to think you’re behind this.”
“I know. It’s one of those dreadful coincidences.” He does not seem overly worried about Zinna. “I don’t know what the connection is, really I don’t. This has nothing at all to do with me. What does it matter why when we know who?”
I exchange a nod with Vikorn.
“The forensic team will be here in a minute. I’ve got some urgent business on the other side of town,” I explain to the maid as I make for the door. Out on the street I take a motorbike taxi back to Chanya. On the way I finally hear my mobile bleep with a text message:
They’ve taken her. They want her tattoo.
45
Our love nest echoes with ghosts of love’s murmurs. I’m too devastated to move. Rooted to the spot, I experience an expanding vacuum in my chest that makes it difficult to breathe. Images of her likely mutil
ation flash across my brain. I loved her long before I knew her face or name. I am consciousness trapped in a pipe. Is there any need to explain? I never wanted anything before she illuminated my life. Now I cannot return to that pre-Chanya drabness, that routine of shadows. (Even the Buddha doesn’t glow like her.) I fear nothing except her loss. I hardly have the will to look at the new text message on my cell phone: Come alone, bring a million USD in nonsequential notes. Help me save her. The message ends with an address on the other side of town, just off Kaosan Road. I call Vikorn. A million U.S. is an oddly modest sum in the circumstances—he’ll send someone over with it immediately. “D’you want a team? We could just blow up the building.”
“Kill her, too?”
Vikorn grunts. “Have it your way. If you lose the fight, I’m going in with a hit squad, and she’ll have to take her chances. Fucking Chiu Chow.”
The money, thrown carelessly into a plastic bag, arrives in the company of a young constable who, from the look on his face, has been suitably terrorized by Vikorn.
But the roads are blocked with the usual traffic jam, which stretches all the way down Sukhumvit, shutting out even the side sois where traffic cannot enter the main stream. Serenity eludes me. I cannot meditate. I’m another helpless creature, just like all the other creatures, from ants to Einsteins, lashed by karma. By the time we arrive on the other side of town, my nerves are jumping, my eyes darting, the hand holding the money is shaking violently. My brain is full of un-Buddhist images of what I will do to them if they’ve started to work on her. At the same time, like any amateur I’m attempting to bribe the Buddha. I’m up to three hogs’ heads and a thousand eggs by the time we turn into Kaosan Road. As far as I can recall, even birth was less stressful.