by John Burdett
The Sheraton is only a short walk from our primitive love nest. We should probably have moved out by now, Chanya and I, but we’ve both got used to being what we really are: a couple of third-world peasants grabbing a sweet moment, favoring quality of life above standard of living. We’re both particularly fond of the big water trough in the backyard, where we wash each other down like elephants. She has to cook in the yard, too, and I’ve become fond of watching her pounding chiles with the mortar and pestle wearing nothing but a sarong. A couple of beers, the odd spliff, the sounds of the street at night while we cuddle up under the fan—what more could a sane man want?
Well, there is just one gigantic loose end that troubles me. I wait for the moment—we’ve just made love, and Chanya, who has morphed into traditional Thai wife, goes to bring the beer from the cooler. I clear my throat. She glances at me. I’m tilting my head in the cutest possible imitation of a question mark. She’s way too smart not to get the point. She puts the bottle down next to my arm, goes to rummage in one of her bags that she dumped in a corner of the room, and returns with a late-model IBM ThinkPad. My eyes turn to saucers while she expertly switches it on, connects the modem to our landline, and types in a code.
In a sweet tone: “What is your question, exactly?”
I stare at the screen while Windows XP Edition radiates its deep blue glow and those stupid Windows icons spread like a virus. “Vikorn. Why exactly was he so keen to protect you after Mitch’s death? I’ve never seen him like that before. He even flew to Indonesia. Did you sleep with him?”
She scowls. “Of course not. He was just terrified that if the CIA interrogated me, I’d spill the beans and Zinna would have him run out of town.”
“How did you get this?” I tap the IBM.
“Mitch checked it into a safe box in the hotel he was staying at when Ishy killed him. I took the key when I left the room because I knew he would have some opium in the safe box. I took the ThinkPad at the same time.”
“You better tell me what really happened, just in case there’s something I need to finesse with the CIA.”
“Sure,” she says as she works the keys. Now we’re out of Windows, into a dire warning of how the U.S. government will systematically hunt down and wreck the lives of anyone and everyone entering this supersecret database without authority.
“It goes like this,” Chanya says.
The scene is Mitch’s apartment in Songai Kolok in the early days, quite some time before Ishy arrived to complicate their lives, the time of day about three in the afternoon. After watching Mitch slip into opium heaven—much to her relief, since he had been particularly tense on this visit—Chanya had pottered contentedly around. No doubt about it, there was something rather special about their relationship, particularly when the White Tornado was deeply opiated. He was stark naked on the bed, and she liked to have his amazing body in the best perspective. Once, wickedly, she placed a cotton towel over his head and imagined what his face would have been like if it had mirrored the beauty of his body. She found a tiny American flag in one of his drawers and stuck it in his hand, spending some time on getting the fist to clench. Out of curiosity she tried working his penis; the erectile tissue was off chasing dragons.
Growing bored after a while, though, and allowing that she wouldn’t have minded if he’d said a word or two, or even simply moved a finger, she wandered into the room he used as an office. He had been particularly voracious for his opium that day when she had arrived, and smoked a pipe as soon as she had handed him the black viscous package. In his haste he had forgotten to turn off his laptop, the screen of which was now swimming with a particularly banal screen saver. A mere jog of the mouse, though, took her directly into the much-vaunted secret world, for he had forgotten to turn off his Internet connection, too.
Which turned out to be as boring as the screen saver. An apparently mindless chatter of international gossip came through on the incessant e-mail: American woman almost raped in Durbar Square in Kathmandu; gang of teenage American cannabis traffickers caught in Singapore; China cracking down on American businessman because he was making too much profit, now accused of being a spy (actually he was spying, the e-mail confided), State Department outrage recommended. Tip-off for the DEA: big shipment of heroin believed to be moving out of the Golden Triangle, down to Udon Thani. Obviously headed for Bangkok.
Interested now, she traced the sequence of messages back through time. Relay teams of CIA, FBI, DEA, Thai customs, and Thai drug enforcement police were chuckling while they secretly followed the shipment from northern Laos, across the border into Thailand; like a snowball it collected more perps the more it rolled. The plan was to wait until it reached Bangkok, so the kingpin would be revealed. As she watched, they lost the shipment, however. Somehow on the outskirts of Krung Thep the van, surreptitiously followed by a great motorcade (of Japanese four-by-fours, so beloved of foreign government agencies), disappeared. Sighs, groans, and moans over the instant messaging. The Americans suspected the Thais of pulling a fast one. So did most of the Thais, who salivated at the probable size of the bribe someone had extorted.
“We think it’s General Zinna again,” one of the real-time dialogues revealed.
“Really?”
“Yeah really.”
“You really think it was him?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, that it was him, yeah.”
“Well, you don’t know it was him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It could have been someone else.”
“Yes, it could. But it wasn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know that. I just know it.”
“Like a hunch or something?”
“Like a hunch, but not really a hunch. A kind of—”
“What?”
“A kind of faux hunch.”
“What’s a faux hunch?”
“Like a hunch but it’s not? I get them from time to time.”
“I’ve never heard of a faux hunch before. I have a conceptual problem with that.”
“I understand that.”
“But cutting to the chase, you’ve got one now?”
“Yeah. Right now. That it was him, yes.”
“Zinna?”
“Yeah. Zinna.”
“I’m bored out of my friggin’ mind. You?”
“If I wasn’t, like, catatonic with boredom I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. You’re my last link with humanity. It’s like, I’m that spaceship captain in that David Bowie song from way back? Thousands of years ago they launched me into cyberspace, and this is all I’ve known—if it wasn’t for this dim, tenuous link with you, I’d be like a cipher by now—a shade. I guess that’s all I am. I’m like those Japanese kids who can only communicate via computers.”
“You need to get laid.”
“Or smoke some dope.”
“Yeah. That’s kind of funny.”
Chanya saw an intermittent cure for boredom in the future: there was something homely and warm about this faceless American conversation—it reminded her of those people in the States who had been good to her. It so happened that Mitch was slowly coming out of his trance, although still a long way from sobriety. He glanced up at her as she entered the bedroom, but his eyes immediately switched back to the ceiling. “Marge, I saw it, Marge.”
Chanya, doing her very best Marge Simpson impersonation: “Saw what, Homer?”
Ecstatically: “I saw the beginning of the world, Marge.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Crestfallen: “Then I saw the end of it.”
“Did the Company send messages again?”
“Yeah. That’s how I saw the beginning and the end of the world, Marge. The Company knows everything.”
“Homer, honey, remind me again of the secret code for accessing encrypted messages from the Company over the Net.”
“AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all upp
ercase] Amerika stop 783.”
48
After Chanya left him that day, she thought about the heroin shipment that had disappeared, and Zinna. In no time at all, she fashioned a plan. She bought a large calculator that coped with more than twenty digits on the screen, but it didn’t come close to telling her how dramatically her karma was about to be improved.
Not enough zeros in the world. Chanya going to the stars this time.
She could hardly believe the brilliance of her idea, or the great waves of relief that were rolling over her. She felt cleansed already, and during the journey she experienced repeated pleasurable shudders, the very shudders that the books associate with the first true experience of samadhi—your mind just cannot comprehend the relief: at first it has enormous difficulty admitting that life, finally, is an ecstatic experience, contrary to all news reports so far received.
She covered her mouth to stifle laughs of joy, kept grinning inappropriately, and sometimes could not resist a sob. This was salvation, big-time. This was exactly what the Buddha taught: you acted with total selflessness, even putting your life on the line, certain that you were following the Path exactly as it presented itself to you in the context of your karma, grabbing at opportunities to liberate all living beings from the chains of existence. She understood that famous Buddha anecdote as if it were happening to her right now: wild strawberries had never tasted so good. She offered a vow that even though she was not yet a nun, she would continue, lifetime after lifetime, to the very end of time, to return to help and heal. Especially to heal. Like Joan of Arc she was a girl suddenly certain of her link with Up There. The only problem: finding the right jao por to whom to sell her plan.
As often happens, though, with grandiose plots to dramatically improve one’s karma, the idea soon began to diminish in her mind. She wondered if she had not spent too much time alone with that madman Mitch: how could an insignificant girl, a whore, hope to pull off something like that?
Her devastation at the manner of his death, though, caused a seismic shift in her state of mind. She and Mitch had already been naked, about to make love, when Ishy burst in with that huge military knife, his face distorted with an insane jealousy. It happened so quickly. She was still lying next to the American when Ishy jumped him, plunged the knife into his guts, tore upward with the blade, then made her watch while he severed the penis, held it in her face, then chucked it on the bedside table. Ishy the artist had been totally eclipsed by Ishy the monster. There was even a righteousness in the tattooist’s rage: a face bursting with self-justification as he held up the severed member. Here was a tortured mind that had given up the last shred of resistance to its demon. Here indeed was the demon in purest form. Her face expressed total revulsion: she was not afraid to die. Clearly Ishy had misunderstood. For her, this could never be an expression of love. Further enraged, he grabbed the telephone and stretched the cable until it was close enough for her to use. Go on then, call the cops, his expression said.
But she turned her face away. She dared not; her humiliation was complete. She would have let Ishy kill her without complaint, but the thought of spending the rest of her life in a Thai jail was more than she could face. (She was a whore and Ishy’s former lover, of course the cops would charge her too.)
With an expression of contempt, Ishy turned the American over and began expertly to remove his tattoo using the knife. Next to her on the bed, Mitch gave his last groans: she watched the light fade from his eyes, which fixed on her in eternal sadness.
Ishy’s face was a hideous caricature, like something from Japanese demonology, as he carefully rolled up the tattoo with both hands and placed it in a plastic bag that he dumped on the table. He picked up the knife again, held up her left breast for inspection, and traced the outline of the dolphin with the tip of the blade—then abruptly chucked the knife on the bed and left.
Shock set in, spasms invaded her body. She forced herself from the bed, staggered around the room like a drunk until she found Mitch’s pipe and smoked some of the opium before she could control herself sufficiently to leave. Tripping a little on the drug (entering the smoker’s world of symbols), she picked up the rose she had discarded on entering the room, put it in a plastic beaker that she filled with water from the bathroom, and placed the beaker at the opposite end of the bedside table to that where the penis lay. Somehow these two icons now balanced each other.
She had nowhere to go but our bar. On her way out, she caught sight of the key to the hotel safe box, where she expected Mitch had stashed more of the opium. She did not consider the IBM ThinkPad until she saw it there in the box the next day. She bribed the hotel receptionist to keep his mouth shut.
When the opium dream began to melt, a great black cloud of guilt gathered in its place; the terror of the kind of karma that her involvement in this hideous crime might involve (there was no doubt, surely, that this murder sprang directly from her lust for Ishy?) produced in her soul a colossal struggle that seemed to take place in the region of her guts. Little by little she began to resume sovereignty of her mind.
She adopted a mask of nonchalance, but her inner life was quite otherwise: faced with hell, she found the strength for one desperate attempt to make amends and was prepared to risk anything. She revived her plan and went to Vikorn with it. The intensity of her advocacy, together with the political benefits from Vikorn’s point of view—and the chance finally to get one over on Zinna—for once overcame the old man’s greed. Yes, he would forgo all profits if she would use the CIA’s laptop in the way she suggested. He would personally arrange the hijack, once the coordinates of General Zinna’s next shipment were known. His only stipulation: that he would retain naming rights to her grand project.
The thing turned out to be quite amazingly simple. She studied the e-mail chatter on the CIA encrypted line until Zinna’s name came up, together with information about the size, direction, and likely destination of this new shipment. She called Vikorn, told him where the drug haul was presently located according to CIA information, and monitored the e-mail while Vikorn made his move. With a troop of plainclothes cops under Vikorn’s personal direction, the sting went off like clockwork. As luck would have it, the haul consisted of a massive amount of newly processed heroin from finest-quality Burmese opium refined to professional-level purity in labs up in the Northwest in the no-man’s-land where the Karen tribe have been warring with the Burmese for more than fifty years. (According to the beat on the street, Zinna no longer touched morphine.) Using his own network, Vikorn was able to sell the haul wholesale within days and use the dough for Chanya’s project, which Vikorn now took over with enthusiasm. Naturally, there was no obvious scream of outrage from Zinna, and for the time being he could only remain in a state of muted eruption. Of course, once Chanya’s plan was fully realized, there would be no doubt about who stole the dope or what he did with it. That suited Vikorn, who was in the mood for some in-your-face revenge.
“Look,” Chanya says, pointing to the stream of instant messaging passing over the screen:
“The latest we have about that Zinna shipment is that it was hijacked by the cops.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, the rumor is pointing at his archenemy, Colonel Vikorn.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“Nope, there’s quite a lot of anecdotal evidence.”
“Like what?”
“Like they are breaking ground on a big site just outside Surin, for a massive general hospital.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s gonna be called the Colonel Vikorn Memorial Hospital.”
“Right. Now I get it.”
I stare at Chanya. “A hospital?”
She takes out a large calculator and shows me how quickly her negative karma will be eclipsed by the number of lifesaving operations the hospital will perform. In less than a month after the hospital is fully operational, she’ll be free of all defilements.
My jaw has dropped. “You were t
he one with Plan C, not Manny?”
“Who?”
“Lieutenant Manhatsirikit?” She looks at me blankly. “Did Vikorn give you the hundred-thousand-dollars’ reward that he was promising to anyone who successfully needled Zinna?” This is not a disinterested question; for more than a week now we have not used contraception.
“I gave it away to a charity that helps rehabilitate prostitutes. I want clean karma. I don’t want any dirty money.”
So she’s even a better Buddhist than me? Well, at least I can see the funny side.
“What are you laughing at?” She hits me, a good strong punch in the arm. “You think I’m just some dumb half-literate superstitious whore, don’t you?”
I’m laughing too hard to reply.
49
We’re packing the eggs and other offerings into the back of the taxi, Chanya and I. While flattered that I considered her worth five hogs’ heads (that was my final bid), she didn’t appreciate the cooking, which, what with one thing and another, took us all night. (Ever tackled the logistics of boiling a thousand eggs over two gas rings? You’re lucky if your saucepan holds more than a couple dozen—think about it.)
Sharing the backseat with the fifth head, which would not fit into the trunk, we tell the driver to take us to Wat Sathon. It’s a power wat about forty miles outside Bangkok frequented only by Thais (a no-frills magic factory renowned for its capacity to fructify the barren, resurrect the impotent, heal the broken, and provide winning lottery numbers to true believers—not to mention the excellence of the cooked food stalls that surround it). The driver plays some upbeat Thai country pop on his music system.
When we arrive, we haul the eggs and heads, marigolds, lotus garlands, fruit, and vegetables into the temple, which is crowded with satisfied customers like us anxious to pay their dues. (I would guess at roughly a hundred and fifty hogs’ heads all told, and the boiled eggs numbered in the tens of thousands.) We lay them out to be scrutinized by the Standing, Walking, and Sitting Buddhas who populate the raised platform. Chanya and I light incense, hold the bunches to our foreheads in deep wais, and give thanks to be still alive and in love (you must value every minute), then break open the packs of gold leaf. You need to be nimble. Lesser practitioners end up with the frail leaf disintegrating all over fingers and faces, but Chanya and I manage to stick it on target every time. She favors the great fat Laughing Buddha, while I myself have a weakness for the Walking Buddha With Left Hand Raised (meaning: Don’t be afraid). Little by little, though, we work our way through all of them, plastering their heads and limbs with the gold as we go, making sure no one is left out. We return to the floor to kneel, wai, and pray. (I think she prays for a daughter; I pray she won’t leave me—how pathetic!) Now it’s time for the cooked food stalls and fried mussels in chiles (they really make the best here), miang kham on a lettuce leaf with coconut shreds, laap pet (spicy duck salad), and a few beers.