Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

Well, there’s nothing like the Buddha when it comes to anticlimax. The house is an old teak structure on stilts in the ancient Thai style. There are still a few left in the Kaosan area, mostly turned into guesthouses for nostalgia-hungry farang. This one has not been well maintained; it looks almost derelict with luscious weeds and other stubborn growths crowding out what must once have been a tropical garden. On the wall next to the front gate is a forlorn sign in Thai, English, and Japanese: TATTOOS. All the windows are shuttered. Parked in the road outside: a large metallic gray BMW with a driver waiting. At my knock the door immediately opens, a well-dressed Chinese man in his early thirties surveys me for a moment and allows his eyes to rest on the plastic bag, then bows slightly as he lets me in. He closes the door carefully behind him and points to the internal door, which leads to the great room that occupies the whole of the first floor.

  For light we are dependent on knife-shaped shafts that penetrate the teak shutters and carve out brilliant elongated forms on the floor and furniture. Some of the light pierces the gloom of the walls, which I now see, with the expansion of my pupils, is chockablock with paintings, geometric designs, and grotesquely enlarged photographs of tattooed bodies both male and female, most of them naked save for the ink. The walls are so extraordinary, they quite eclipse the humans who sit below them. I think Gauguin’s hut on Tahiti was like this. Here in this big old space the tattooist has let his imagination run riot. And what an imagination! Influences from the great Hokusai to Hieronymus Bosch to Warhol to Van Gogh to Picasso to graffiti on the Tokyo subway: Ishy’s art is as eclectic as a magpie, but somehow, in the great heaping of color and shape, he has managed an appalling coherence. The walls are an extension of his own tattoos: extraordinary, intense, compelling, and ultimately incomprehensible, the product of a wild genius compelled at risk of madness to say: I am.

  When my eyes drop to the sunken table, I wonder if I have not misunderstood the situation and clumsily stumbled onto a business meeting. Each of the seven Chinese is dressed in a business suit and tie, save for one man in his forties who is perhaps the chief negotiator and sports an open-necked shirt under his cashmere jacket. The floor has been dropped to accommodate legs and feet under the table in the old style, but from the other side of the room it looks like a congregation of dwarfs sitting on the floor around a long teak dining table below walls decorated by a mad god. A long shaft of light illuminates Ishy, who sits at the head in a splendid white linen open-neck shirt that reveals a wedge of his tattoos, with the inevitable bottle of sake in front of him. Chanya, in a silk shawl the color of old gold, sits next to him in near darkness. When I approach, she explains in a grumble: “They gave me an anesthetic. I can’t feel my tits.” To emphasize the point, she massages them with both hands. Without a word I walk to the head of the table with the plastic bag, which I dump in front of Ishy. Everyone stares at the bag, but no one grabs the money. What have I interrupted here? Finally Ishy clears his throat. I think he must have been drinking heavily, for there is no stutter.

  “Unfortunately, it’s no longer as simple as that.”

  “A pardonable misunderstanding, no one’s fault,” the Chinese in the open-necked shirt mutters, flashing me a ghostly smile. “But it will have to be cleared up one way or another.”

  Ishy engages my eyes. “It seems the million is in respect of Chanya’s tattoo only. They were going to cut it out and cure it. Imagine, a million for just that little dolphin. I could have been rich if I’d had more time.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “They were assuming they could just take the other tattoos to sell on the black market. There’s quite a demand for my work now, mostly in Japan among the yakuza, who use them as status symbols—the way Japanese businessmen used to keep Van Goghs in safes and only take them out at bragging time. It’s quite depressing for an artist who wants exposure. After all, Van Gogh’s financial problems are over.”

  “Where are the other tattoos?”

  “Upstairs. The most recent are still being cured. Did you know the process is identical to that for pigskin?”

  “How long has this—ah—trade been going on?”

  “It’s a long story. You could say Mitch Turner was the first. I never intended it to get out of hand like this. I didn’t really intend to kill anybody except him.” He gives a matter-of-fact flick of the hand in Chanya’s direction. “I couldn’t have her, but I couldn’t stand any other man to have her either. You would have been next. But if one is going to kill, why miss the opportunity to make a profit? I’ve coveted that creamy white flesh of yours since the night we met, especially on your back.”

  I had already guessed all this, of course. Standing quite still about six feet from the table, speaking like a man calling across a valley, my voice echoing in the cavernous room, I say: “So why can’t they take the other tattoos, cured and uncured?”

  Ishy shakes his head at my obtuseness. “Because I’ve mortgaged them to the Japs already. The yakuza loan sharks. They’re sending a team with a lawyer. Should be here any minute. With the Italian.” At my baffled glance: “My dear fellow, you didn’t expect a war, did you, in this day and age? I called the Japs with the full agreement of Mr. Chu.”

  “That is correct,” confirms the Chinese in the open-necked shirt, speaking in a monotone. “We’re all part of the global business community. It would be unfortunate if this little contractual matter were to come between us when we have so much trade with our Japanese colleagues. It would be unthinkable for us simply to take the works away, now that we are aware of a possibly prior and more lawful claim. I’m afraid Mr. Ishy is too much of an artist to trouble himself with legal niceties. He has mortgaged everything at least twice.” A pained smile. “That is the problem.”

  Ishy opens his hands helplessly and makes a guilty face. With sudden eagerness: “D’you want to see them?”

  He leads us up the stairs to a narrow corridor with two doors. The first opens onto a bedroom, the walls of which are covered with tattoo designs of the most intimate—and pornographic—variety. He points to a pale skin curing on a single wooden plank.”I figured if I was going to kill people for their hides, I might as well combine it with some form of community service. He was a yakuza thug, basically, very senior though, CEO of that phony corporation that is forcing peasants off their lands in Isaan so they can grow fucking chopsticks. He was the one who ordered the killing of that journalist who was a friend of mine—that butterfly tattoo was one of my best. Actually, this godfather was one of my first customers over here. Of course, he wanted a damned samurai on his back—my people really have a problem with mythology. Samurai were mostly drunken homosexuals with a psychotic streak, but don’t say that out loud in Japan. I had to be subtle. Fortunately, he was too stupid to understand the message in his own skin. Not bad, is it?”

  The tattoo on the hide on the board is, as a matter of fact, a triumph of subtle satire. To a cursory glance, the samurai in magnificent armor and helmet on the back of a great black stallion, wielding his voluptuous bow, is the very image of the perfect warrior. Look a little closer, however; with just a few deft strokes, Ishy has made his point: drunk and gay, there’s no doubt about it, a bombastic narcissist all dressed up with nowhere to go.

  “May I ask why you had to sever their cocks?”

  Ishy frowns and scratches his head, then jerks a thumb at Chanya. “Her karma. I did it to Mitch Turner in a jealous rage, but after that I realized any man could have her. Any jerk in the street. He only had to pay, right?” Chanya winces and looks at the floor. “I would have castrated the whole city for her. That’s love.”

  “But the men you castrated were already dead.”

  “I said love, not logic. Love is a language of symbols—you should know that.”

  “Why did you have to kill people you’d already tattooed? Why not kill anyone on the street, then tattoo them later?”

  He shakes his head gravely. “A recipe for mediocrity. For a start, the ink needs to pen
etrate far below the surface before you get that quality of color and shade. Secondly, you’ve failed to understand the market. I’m not just selling tattoos, I’m selling murder at the same time. People want that frisson, the cachet of owning the decorated skin of a murdered man, the very skin he wore in life, before he was cut down like a tree for the purpose of art. It’s the civilized equivalent of collecting shrunken heads.” A swig from the sake bottle he brought with him: “I’m also selling notoriety, of course. When this gets out, the prices of my work will increase a hundredfold.” Thoughtfully: “What is murder but suicide by an extrovert? We are all part of the human family after all, and only murderers experience the unbearable passion of true love.”

  The man in the open-necked shirt nods in agreement.

  The room next door contains only two wall hangings, both covered in silk cloth. Ishy uncovers the first. “A sad case, that young CIA spy. It was what he wanted—he was quite pleased with it. I guess it was all he expected from life, but he ended up with a Thai whore instead.” The tattoo is deeply sad for anyone who knew Stephen Bright: a young woman, a Caucasian with long blond hair, cradling an infant in the tradition of Madonna and child. The sheer simplicity of the lines (perhaps Ishy was making a point, for it is a touch too simple) makes it all the more poignant.

  “It’s brilliant,” I find myself saying with a gulp.

  “But it’s not as good as this,” Ishy declares as he pulls the cover off the second, larger work. Chanya gasps at the sight of a familiar image in an unfamiliar situation. I also gasp, as does the man in the open-necked shirt. Even his thugs are impressed. “Mitch Turner,” Ishy explains. “It was his idea, something he got from a book or an opium dream, or some spell he was under. Of course, I insisted on my own interpretation.”

  But for once Ishy has maintained a fierce discipline, which is a big part of the magic. An amazingly dense and virile green vine fills the whole of the tattoo with such vividness, it seems to grow up the wall on which it hangs. The rose blossoms themselves are downplayed, hardly more than crimson afterthoughts, highlighting the leaves, each of which, even the tiniest, bears the legend in blood: There is no god but God, Muhammad is the prophet of God.

  Chanya bursts into hysterical sobs as we hear a polite knock on the front door.

  46

  We have all returned to the great downstairs room. Hours have passed. The man in the open-necked shirt speaks fluent Japanese, and the negotiations have been continuing in that language with the newcomers, a somewhat muscular band of Japanese men in black business suits, all of whom have at least one pinkie missing. They are lined up against one wall, while the Chiu Chow thugs are lined up against another, each warrior perpetually marking his opposite number, while Chanya and I sit on cushions on the floor. Ishy, the chief Japanese negotiator, and the man in the open-necked shirt sit drinking sake at the long table. Quite drunk now, Ishy has undone most of his shirt, perhaps intentionally displaying his hero Admiral Yamamoto, who stares sternly out between the linen folds. The Italian, a slim, gaunt fellow with a mass of curly dark hair, wears a black short-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans, slippers without socks. He squats in a corner of the room with his back against the wall. Ishy has explained, not without some disdain, that he is an art restorer, flown in from Rome. The Japanese, it seems, are taking no chances. (He can peel a micron of paint off a five-hundred-year-old masterpiece, Ishy reported.) It seems that at least one of the Japanese thugs is also a surgeon. In the circumstances, Ishy’s good humor is inexplicable. He grows more cheerful by the minute. Finally there is a pause in the intense discussions.

  “They’ve decided the main point,” Ishy calls out to me. “It’s only details they’re discussing now. Copyright, merchandising, that kind of thing.”

  Simultaneously Chanya, who has understood more than I have been able to, from some Japanese she picked up in the course of trade, has collapsed in another great torrent of sobs, taking frequent moments to stare disbelievingly at Ishy, her eyes great saucers of horror and disbelief. When both the Italian and the Japanese surgeon make toward us, she clasps her breasts possessively.

  But they pass by us just as Ishy removes his shirt, then the rest of his clothes.

  “The yakuza are very humane,” he explains while the surgeon takes a syringe out of his pocket and a small vial out of another. He pulls the hygienic paper off the syringe, pulls the protective cap off the needle, and plunges the needle into the vial. “They said I could die first. I said no, I want to preside over the removal of my masterpiece. One wrong move by that wop, and I’ll curse him for eternity.” Shaking his head at Chanya: “Don’t worry, love—it’ll pay for everything. There’s nothing more to worry about. This way you get to keep your tits.” He pauses while one of his countrymen ties a white scarf with black Japanese characters around his head in the tradition of kamikaze, then watches while the surgeon injects him in the arm: “It’s one of those new brain drugs. I’ll be able to follow everything painlessly, like a great fog of consciousness looking down on my exfoliation. I see this as a personal triumph—like the snake I am, I’m shedding my skin, my ego, and my life in praise of Buddha and for the love of man. After all I’ve been through, I think that’s heroic. You may not want to witness this, though. You’re free to go. I told them you won’t tell anyone.”

  I tell Chanya to get the hell out while she still can, even though these men seem to pose no threat to her and indeed have more or less ignored her since they cut their deal. Am I protecting her, or is there some other motive? Perhaps I’m ashamed of my morbid curiosity. Perhaps I don’t want her to see how fascinated I am by what will happen next. (Maybe I don’t want to see how fascinated she might be.) I take her to the door, kiss her, and push her away. By the time I have returned, the drug is already taking effect—Ishy is losing control of his legs. The surgeon barks orders in Japanese, and five men immediately surround the artist and lower him gently onto the long table. Already he has lost all control over his body, there is no connection between his mind and his nerves, but light remains in those unblinking eyes. I would love to know what he’s thinking.

  Under the direction of the Italian, the surgeon makes some deft strokes with a scalpel from armpits to hips and along the length of the underarms. He makes light circular incisions at the ankles and wrists and along the length of the penis. With quite astonishing speed, assisted by the Italian and one other man, they unpeel him. As with any masterpiece, the Italian carefully rolls up the hide to take it upstairs for curing. All the others follow, leaving me alone in the cavernous room with his brilliantly colored work glowing from the walls, while Ishy, finally naked, presides inscrutably over his own slow dying.

  SEVEN

  Plan C

  47

  Well, we’ve received the final official lab results,” Elizabeth Hatch says in that level, hypercontrolled way of hers. Nevertheless, she casts a slightly sheepish glance at me. (I have my spies: I heard on the grapevine she went on another tour last night and ended up with the same girl. This could be love—I have a feeling she’ll be back.) “It seems the DNA is identical in the Stephen Bright and the Mitch Turner case. The only problem: the DNA, according to our database, belongs to the terrorist Achmad Yona, who was killed in the bomb blast in Samalanga in Indonesia a few weeks before Bright.”

  “So he killed Mitch Turner, died in the bomb blast, came back to kill Stephen,” Hudson says.

  I’m not totally convinced of an ironic intention. The conversation, in the CIA’s suite at the Sheraton, possesses the surreal quality of a rehearsal. These two officers will be filing their own individual reports, of course; this is a practice session.

  “So you narrow down the possibilities. One, Achmad Yona had nothing to do with any of the slayings. He distributed hair from his beard and two of his fingers to colleagues in order to create a red herring and/or to enhance his reputation. Two, Yona did both killings and the DNA evidence found at the Indonesian bomb blast was a plant.”

  “The wa
y to handle it,” Hudson declares, straightening his back (he has miraculously mutated into Paper Warrior First Class), “is to play down the Indonesia thing. So they found DNA belonging to him in that bomb blast—so what? They burned all the other remains before we could get to them, so we don’t know for sure what they actually found, if anything. We can’t rely on the Indonesians to play totally straight with us. They’re Muslim, after all—under the skin they’re not totally unsympathetic to the radical cause.”

  “That’s it,” agrees Elizabeth. “We finesse the Indonesia thing into a footnote.”

  “That’s the way to play it,” from Hudson.

  The two suddenly remember my presence. “Oh, we brought you over here because we wanted to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymnbook.” Elizabeth smiles. “Anything we’ve said so far inconsistent with your understanding of what went on?”

  Tired of lying for Vikorn and suddenly haunted by an image of Mustafa and his father, I experience a reckless, liberating, and profoundly Buddhist compulsion to tell the truth. “Actually, Mitch Turner and Stephen Bright were killed by a mad Japanese, a tattooist with a terrible personality problem who confessed before he died. The killings had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”

  I am more than a little curious at the effect this bombshell will have on these two professionals. Which only goes to show I’m not so smart; I should have remembered that farang inhabit a parallel universe. The two suffer from a moment of collective deafness. Or are they embarrassed? Third-world cops do come out with the most ridiculous crap after all.

  “Well, that’s great,” says Elizabeth after a long moment when no one looks me in the eye. “We can report that local law enforcement agrees with our initial report.” She gives me one of her superior-librarian looks as I make for the exit. “I know his Colonel sees it our way, too.”

  When I glance back from the door, Hudson mouths an apologetic explanation: “GS Eleven.”