by John Burdett
Me: No.
10
On the plane back to Bangkok, with Tietsin’s mantra clattering around my skull like a broken bell, I asked myself the question, Why am I a crook? Because my wife whom I loved convinced me that my son whom I loved even more needed an expensive education to keep him from ending up as a bent cop like his dad; but my noble sacrifice of integrity only made me feel like I was drowning in a sewer. I blame the version of capitalism which is destroying the world: you have to be a shit to survive, but your spouse and kids will hate you for turning yourself into a shit and failing to protect them from—yourself. Being born rich may be the only solution, except they always find a way of getting you on taxes. But why Tibetan Buddhism, and most of all, why Tietsin? I didn’t really have an answer except for the rather lame one that good old Theravada was fine for rice farmers, but it didn’t seem strong enough medicine for stressed-out cops. Now I couldn’t complain about the strength of the medicine.
I’d had the check-in clerk give me a window seat on the left. I couldn’t resist them: the mountains, the mountains. Each one fully realized, spectacularly different, taking its inevitable place among the others. Sure, they were built by gods; no human has ever managed that kind of harmony in chaos. Somehow they were the ultimate authority in all this, and I thought they were probably in favor of my decision to dare madness; anything was better than the monkey mind I was born with. I was not looking forward to meeting Colonel Vikorn, though. I had a new and different master now.
Vikorn was, of course, the big problem. I suppose, farang, you would advise me to turn over a ruthless new leaf, dump the corrupt third-world gangster cop who was my boss, right? Well, I don’t know about the West, but in the East things are never that simple. For a start I owed him gatdanyu, a kind of blood debt that every Thai owes to someone who has saved their life. Vikorn saved mine and that of my soul brother, Pichai (before he died and reincarnated as my son), by giving us jobs after Pichai killed our yaa baa dealer when we were teenagers. In Thailand to fail to honor gatdanyu is the vilest of transgressions, the one that above all others will land you in the lowest hell. And then there was the troubling matter of my certain assassination if I ever betrayed the Colonel in any way. What would my loved ones do then?
After tormenting myself for the three-and-a-half-hour flight back to Bangkok, I decided to take a middle path. I would persuade Vikorn to stop dealing in heroin after this next shipment had given him the means to put General Zinna out of business. Once I’d made that decision, everything was sunny again. I knew I could persuade the Old Man; after all, he was at a time in life when the sane prepare themselves for their next incarnation. I got off the plane with joyful anticipation in my heart.
“What’s wrong with trafficking in heroin?” Vikorn demanded from behind his huge old desk. “Why should the pharmaceutical industry take everything? They want to ban all the fun drugs at the same time as turning every human experience into a treatable disease. Drugs for sleeping, drugs for waking, drugs for peeing, drugs for erections. For them the human body is an oil well of maladies that can be exploited. It’s the biggest fraud in history. You find a perfectly harmless drug like cannabis or opium, which has the disadvantage of being easy to produce, and what do you do? You criminalize it, find a substitute that is impossible to produce outside of a laboratory, take out the patent, and your corporation is good for another hundred years. Meanwhile people die all the time from prescribed drugs—or suffer worse. Ever hear of Vioxx? Ever hear of thalidomide? That wonderful product that produced such spectacular mutations, babies born with fingers growing out of their eyes and faces on the tops of their heads? And what about Seroxat and Prozac, driving people homicidal? More than a hundred thousand people die in the U.S. every year from prescribed drugs. That’s more fatalities in a month than smack kills in a decade. And by the way, what about the killer drug of all killer drugs, alcohol? The breweries and distilleries don’t like us because we sell a superior product that rivals theirs.”
Vikorn stood up so he could walk up and down in front of me. “Sure, there are casualties, but all a sensible citizen who is contemplating shooting smack for the first time needs to know is: Is the ratio of drug to body weight correct, and did I cauterize the needle? That’s why I don’t approve of selling it to kids, who tend to take risks. But what can you do? Kids are on everything. Have you any idea how well Xanax is selling over the counter? And what the hell do you think it is? A heroin substitute, of course, and Prozac is an expensive substitute for marijuana, except that it doesn’t get you high, just vague. All I do is provide the originals for discerning clients. It’s like what you told me about French cheese: Camembert lait cru is illegal in Europe, because of bureaurocratic ignorance. Addicts have to buy the real thing under the counter.”
He wasn’t incandescent with rage. He wasn’t even angry. He wasn’t even disdainful. Buddha help me, he was amused. The old bastard was so delighted with the deal I’d struck with Tietsin, I could have spat on his desk and he would have forgiven me. We were in his office with the bare wooden floorboards and the anticorruption poster above his head. He had sat with uncharacteristic patience while I pleaded with him to stop dealing in heroin after this next shipment. Now he was standing behind me patting me on the shoulder. “Take a day off. Take a week off.”
I blushed and coughed at the same time, my big hope for salvation now a busted balloon that suddenly seemed to belong to a state of mind only available in the Himalayas. The power of the ordinary, the familiar, the inevitably crooked, that non-sacred place where the rubber hits the road, had entirely eclipsed Tietsin and his magic. Obviously, I was some kind of airhead, a space cadet overly susceptible to any little mind gimmick that pointed at the transcendent. “Okay,” I croaked, defeated and depressed. “I’ll take a week. Maybe longer.”
He didn’t seem to like the maybe longer. “Right. Well, take your time, but if it’s not too much trouble, once you’ve squared everything with the Buddha, go see that mule, that Australian tart your Tibetan chum busted for us. Try to find out how he did it. I can’t believe his intelligence about our very own General Zinna is better than ours.”
I have an image of myself leaving his office with shoulders bent, head hanging, although I expect it wasn’t as bad as all that. Out in the heat, everything seemed normal except me. The mom-and-pop cooked-food stalls, the whores hanging out on Soi 7, the designer-fake stalls all along the top of Sukhumvit, the cynical expressions on the faces of the cops, the pollution, the traffic jams: how come I suddenly didn’t seem to fit?
11
I’m still here, farang, at the Rose Garden. I’ve commuted from the bathroom to the bar, but I’m way too stoned to order alcohol. I’m nursing a nam menau, lime-and-water, sitting at a table in back, watching the business of flesh take place in accordance with rituals I’ve known all my life. Just now a well-dressed, professional-class Englishman in his late twenties canvassed the girls one by one, sotto voce, to see which of them would tolerate anal intercourse, and for what price. Having carefully constructed a short list, he chose the volunteer whom, I assume, he found most attractive. He struck me as one of those metroman types who plans his vacations on a laptop. The decision made and the mouse double-clicked, he escorted his lunchtime bride courteously out the door, no doubt to one of the short-time hotels around here. Now that he’s gone, things are quieter than ever. The other farang are absorbed in their own conversations, or have dropped in for a quick lunch and to read the foreign-language newspapers. They are regulars who treat the place just like any other beer bar, and the girls know to leave them alone. Finally, I manage to rouse myself to go to the Buddha shrine, just like the girls do when they arrive. I wai the tree wrapped in a monk’s robe and ask for the mental strength to take me through the last chapter of my personal flashback. It’s a kind of pain therapy that forces itself on me, this reliving of catastrophe: the more it hurts, the longer I can maintain the trappings of sanity afterward—until the next bout.
After my interview with Vikorn, which took place immediately after I hit Bangkok that day, I was excited about Chanya and Pichai coming back from deep country in Isaan. I had begun to fantasize about getting enough dough together to retire early—say in five years—and go live the simple rural life up there where the air is cleaner and the grass greener. I liked the idea of a near-silent existence punctuated by visits to the temple, meditation, consultations with monks and abbots concerning my spiritual progress. I yearned for the comfort and cleanness of a life dedicated to the Buddha. When Chanya sent a text message to say they were at the bus station and were on their way, I texted back to say I would be there soon after they arrived at the hovel. I figured it would take more than two hours for them to reach home, because the traffic was so bad on Sukhumvit and Petchburi Road.
It was then that I made one of those trivial decisions that can have an enormous impact on the rest of your life: I turned off my cell phone. I wanted to take the moment to allow my mind to relax—I’d hit the ground running when I got off the plane from Kathmandu and had hardly stopped for breath. I went to the temple at Wat Rachanada on the river and in the silence allowed Tietsin’s mantra to spin without restriction in my head. I cannot tell you the specific Pali words, farang, for I am bound to secrecy, but I am allowed to describe the blade wheel, which is imagined as a star-shaped weapon closely resembling the shiken used by ninjas, although unlike the shiken it has a disturbing way of morphing into other shapes. The blade wheel is the enemy of self-delusion—“self-delusion” meaning just about everything in the field of normal everyday perception, in particular our most cherished delusions about ourselves. I didn’t switch the phone on again until it was all over.
It is usual in these kind of circumstances for the bereaved to say, I knew something was wrong; but I didn’t. Even when I noticed the small crowd outside our apartment and the way they could not look me in the eye, I failed to make any connection with the stain on the road or the private car parked nearby, or the driver in tears talking to some uniformed cops. When a young constable blurted that I needed to go to the hospital on Soi 49 immediately, I realized the stain on the street was blood, and my mind split into pieces. At the hospital Chanya and I could only stare at each other across the bed where Pichai’s six-year-old body lay dying.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I let him get out of the taxi on the wrong side. The driver of the other car wasn’t going fast, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It’s all my fault.”
Haggard, I shook my head. “No, it’s not your fault. This is my punishment.”
She let a beat pass. In a dead tone: “For being Vikorn’s consigliere? I was the one who talked you into that. You would never have accepted the job if not for me.”
I knew then that I had lost her as well as my son. Her sorrow and guilt was of the kind no human agency can assuage. And so was mine. I remember thinking in a savage mood, Tietsin, Tietsin, Tietsin. Only you can help me now.
A week later, after the monks at the local wat had instructed Pichai’s spirit on how to avoid rebirth and burned his small body, Chanya announced she had made arrangements to be a mai chi, a novice nun, at a wat in the far east of Thailand, near the border with Laos. They were a radical sect composed entirely of women dedicated to a life of meditation and contemplation of the most extreme kind: four hours sleep per night, near-starvation rations, no electricity, and absolutely nothing to do except develop the inner life. They were not allowed real corpses to meditate on anymore, but the local hospitals provided them with photographs of cadavers, which they used as a method to concentrate on transience. I, on the other hand, tried every means I could think of to get hold of Tietsin by phone, or in any other way, but he had disappeared from view. I was left with only his mantra.
But a mantra, after all, is simply a way of tricking the mind into a higher level of consciousness, and this was something I could achieve only intermittently. There were moments when I was flying high, when death really seemed to be the bad joke the Buddha always said it was. There were nights spent entirely with Pichai in his spiritual form—I’m not going to pretend they were mere dreams—when he comforted me and told me he’d decided to abandon his former body and I should not concern myself about it. He told me there will be no opportunities for people to evolve spiritually in the generations to come, for we will be entirely enslaved by materialism, and his spirit had therefore preferred to return to the Far Shore. He told me there were many millions over there, like him, waiting out the next few millennia until the Maitreya Buddha incarnates on earth and we can all be human again.
At this level the mind knows no fear and experiences the joy of absolute freedom. Cannabis cannot lead to such heights, although you can use it to sustain them; but then the crashes are all the more devastating. After Chanya left, I spent a week in bed clawing at my mattress, unable to believe the anguish. When I finally went back to work, I had learned to treat my grief with a combination of dope and meditation. The case of the murder of Frank Charles, aka the Case of the Fat Farang, also nicknamed the Hollywood File, was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Who cares whodunit? The grim, mechanical rituals of the world grind on, monochrome now, and entirely without interest to me; although Lek keeps assuring me I’m going to snap out of it sooner or later.
12
Believe it or not, of those few in my intimate circle, Vikorn is the most concerned about my mental health. He insisted on paying for Pichai’s funeral and came to listen to the monks chanting over my son’s corpse before they burned him. The Colonel seemed quite moved; he wiped his eyes a couple of times and hugged me once when nobody could see. I watched his face as they pushed Pichai’s little casket on the rollers into the oven and the smoke started coming out of the chimney. For all his faults, Vikorn is Thai, after all. The Western superstition that karma stops with death is as improbable to him as it is to me; I’m sure that, like the rest of us, he saw himself for a moment being rolled into the oven.
After about ten days, though, he has started to lose patience. His technique now is scrupulously to avoid any mention of my grief; maybe he thinks I’ll get over it if he pretends it’s business as usual? This morning he called me into his office to give me my orders for the week. I was in a morose frame of mind, so he tried jollying me up—not a strategy he has spent much of his life developing: “Tell you what, if you like I’ll give you that stupid murder old Sukum has got his knickers in a twist about. Put your name on the top of the file: you’ll be officer in charge. That way you’ll be sure to get promoted when the board next meets, even if you are half farang. What were the circumstances again, I seem to remember it sounded kind of exotic?”
“Famous rich farang Hollywood director gutted from solar plexus to crotch,” I heard myself saying in a bored and somewhat sulky voice, “a stone in his mouth, suggesting, probably falsely, that he was done in by the Sicilian mafia, but there was also an imago in his mouth and it looked as if someone had recently feasted on his brains: the top hemisphere of the skull was cut around and removed—probably done by a rotary saw of the surgical kind. Some of the brains had been eaten: a paper plate and a plastic spoon were found in that squalid flophouse at the end of Soi Four/Four. All of which indicates the invisible hand of Thomas Harris.”
“So why doesn’t someone arrest Thomas Harris?”
“He didn’t do it. He wrote the novels the crime is based on, along with Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and maybe some other noir influences—I wouldn’t be surprised to find Baudelaire in there somewhere.” To Vikorn’s baffled gaze, I say, “I guess you have to be at least half farang.”
“Exactly. The case is yours.”
“I don’t want it. I don’t want promotion. Let Sukum get the credit; I’ve already told him I’ll help if he wants.”
I watch the old man’s expression freeze into contempt. “You’ve been meditating again, haven’t you? I can always tell when your monk manqué side starts to show. W
as it those bloody hills up there that got you all sanctimonious? I knew I should have sent someone with you.” I do not say, You know exactly why I feel like this. He went back to his desk shaking his head, pretending to be baffled. “Other jao por have to worry about getting ripped off by their staff, normal stuff like that. You I have to worry about losing to the Buddha. What did I do to deserve it? Get out. And, by the way, the Hollywood case is yours.”
I stand up to go. At the door I say in a humble, half-dead voice, “Let Sukum keep the case, I’ll solve it for him—I just don’t want the stress of all the paperwork.”
He purses his lips ambiguously, and I’m forced to leave it at that.
Now, back at my desk in the open-plan office I’m logged on to Yahoo! to check my horoscope. Apparently, I should avoid antique collectors for the next two days, along with other claustrophobic situations. When I check my Chinese horoscope on one of the other clairvoyant sites, I find that Wood Rabbits like me can expect a clear run of good luck. The online I-Ching (I always use the Wilhelm translation) is less positive:
Hexagram 36. Darkening of the Light, “Line Six”
He penetrates the left side of the belly.
One gets at the very heart of the darkening of the light,
And leaves gate and courtyard.
That sounds more like it. I’m just through the commentary when I spy Sukum, purple and apoplectic with rage, charging toward me, drawing disapproving glances from our Buddhist colleagues. The open-plan office makes it possible to prepare for attack from a distant desk. I find myself wanting to huddle, somehow, while I watch him negotiate desk after desk, monitor after monitor, where mostly uniformed cops try to figure out how best to prioritize the relentless storm of crime reports. He is too Thai to really make a scene in public, so when he finally arrives at my desk he hisses rather than yells.