The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  “Why the airport?” Lek wants to know. He’s finished his drink and is looking around for somewhere to dump the empty bag. He settles for a flat space on top of the driveshaft casing.

  I tell him, “One of our mules got busted by General Zinna,” but I don’t mention the Tibetan connection.

  Lek whistles. There’s a lot about Colonel Vikorn’s operation he doesn’t know, but there is one rule everyone knows: don’t mess with the mules. Over the years, Vikorn has managed to attract the best kind of carriers: middle-ranking business executives in need of a small pile to regulate a tax problem, respectable farang housewives with kids who see a way to get funding for a house improvement they’ve been longing for (that new veranda—or do you call them patios?—could be yours for just twelve hours of heart-stopping excitement beginning at an international airport near you); and, best of all, business travelers in their sixties or older (successful aging hippies, for the most part) who always fly first-class and are never searched and who carry junk just for the thrill and greed of it. And the reason the Colonel has been able to attract such quality is the same reason other successful enterprises are able to attract the finest in human resources: reliability and high pay. Sure, the sales force is augmented by lower-quality foot soldiers, but they are kept at arm’s length, and even then they are given protection and security way above anything Vikorn’s rivals provide. For that reason the busting of Smith is an image-control emergency as well as a deep wound inflicted by Zinna, and it will have to be avenged sooner or later.

  Except that Vikorn and Zinna might have to form a temporary partnership if they want the Tibetan off their backs. Sooner or later it must occur to their lordships, as it has occurred to me, that there are plenty of other potential buyers in Southeast Asia, including someone in Phnom Penh said to be very close to the chief of police, who might jump into the vacuum and buy up the whole of Tietsin’s stock. But can these two old barons suspend their feud for long enough to protect Thailand from a hostile takeover by a Khmer upstart? Do sharks share lunch boxes?

  “We just have to make sure she doesn’t know anything,” I explain. “Apparently she keeps shooting her mouth off about cops being behind her, but she doesn’t seem to have any names or contact numbers.”

  “Who was her contact here?”

  “Some farang in Kaosan Road. He’s just a low-level platoon manager—he never has more than five mules working for him at any one time, and he doesn’t know anyone above his manager, who is another farang who doesn’t speak Thai.”

  “So how did she get busted at all?” Lek wants to know.

  “Exactly. Someone’s infiltrated our organization at an overseas outpost.”

  “Kathmandu?”

  “Right.”

  “Vikorn has people in Kathmandu?”

  “Not exactly. They are remote subcontractors, but they do supply quite a lot of low-level mules, like Mary Smith.”

  “So why not just go to the subcontractors in Kathmandu?”

  I scratch my ear. “You ever have anything to do with Hindus? They have such huge extended families. You start out thinking you’re with the eldest son, then it turns out he’s fronting for an uncle, who is fronting for one of his cousins, who’s fronting for the patriarch on the mother’s side, and so on.” I raise my palms to the Buddha: “We don’t really know who they are.”

  “You don’t have names?”

  “Sure. Narayan or Shah. Same as fifty percent of the phone book.”

  “No addresses?”

  I cough. “That’s what we’re trying to get. The address of our subcontractors in Nepal. Our firewalls are so good, only the mules seem to know.”

  When my phone explodes with Must be some way out of here, I see that it is Sukum calling, and share a wink with Lek. I’ve already told him that the Fat Farang Case has taken a bizarre twist which may have Sukum and Mad Moi working together again.

  “She’s gone,” Sukum says in an excited voice. “Fled. I checked with her probation officer. I even called her sister, the one who talks to me, and the pharmacy where she usually gets her prescription drugs for her mental problems. None of them has seen her in more than five weeks.”

  “Five weeks? That’s a long time before he was killed. Doesn’t sound like proof of murder to me.”

  “Five weeks, three weeks, two days, what’s the diff? I’m being intuitive here, cutting out unnecessary paperwork, like you. The point is, she hasn’t been near her probation officer, so she’s risking jail time. So it’s drastic. She’s on the run. Look, do I know her or not?”

  “Nobody knows Doctor Moi like you, Khun Sukum,” I say, sharing a grin with Lek, who has gone into a devastating mime of Sukum, including his compulsive teeth cleaning and his zippy little farts. This colors the tone of my voice, which causes Sukum to suspect flippancy. Sukum loathes flippancy because he doesn’t understand it, even though he’s been trying all his life.

  “You’re being flippant?” he wants to know.

  “No. Not at all.”

  “You’re putting two and two together, yes? Just before the murder she disappeared?”

  “Okay, Detective Sukum, okay, I accept your expert advice. But we do need to know exactly why she disappeared, d’you see? A suspect who disappears five minutes after the criminal act is not at all the same as a suspect who makes themselves scarce a month before the event.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Assuming guilt in both cases, the second will have a cast-iron alibi.”

  “I’ll check,” Sukum says without nuance, and closes his phone.

  What with the day going to sleep on us, and the traffic hardly shifting—even though we have made the crucial turn from Asok onto Sukhumvit, we are now stuck behind a builder’s truck in the gridlocked outside lane, which we need in order to access the turnoff for the highway, so it looks like we’re in for the long haul—Lek and I cannot resist running through some of the old Sukum and Moi stories, and the way she always seems to get the better of him.

  After a low-speed chase that lasted for most of Sukum’s career as a detective, he was only able to bust her on cannabis cultivation and tax evasion, even though everyone knows she arranged for the deaths of two of her four ex-husbands and ran her own yaa baa production unit as a cottage industry for more than ten years. She took revenge on Sukum by paying a tea lady to slip LSD into the detective’s morning iced lemon tea; Lek mimes Sukum on a paranoid acid trip to a disturbing level of accuracy: Sukum crawled under his desk, curled up in fetal position, and shivered there for almost an hour, periodically yelling for his Toyota, before we called the medics to give him a tranquilizer and take him away. The LSD had to come from Moi—this was the midnineties, when acid had disappeared more or less completely from world markets and nobody except a trained chemist like the Doctor herself could have synthesized it.

  When the cab finally passes the tollbooth and we’re speeding toward Suvarnabhum we’re entertaining each other with speculations of how Doctor Moi will stitch Sukum up this time. I have to say, it’s fun sometimes to watch Lek’s darker side. As he points out, We’re all dual, darling.

  “But what’s so amazing about her is the way she always manages to look so good in those HiSo magazines. How does she even get invited to those fantastic parties, that’s what I would like to know.”

  “She’s old money,” I explain. “Teochew—her people originally hailed from Swatow about a hundred and fifty years ago, where they were members of one of the triad societies. Apparently her family is quite senior in one of them. While she was growing up her grandfather maintained mob connections and ran the triad’s secret banking system in Bangkok, which has tentacles all over the Pacific Rim. Most of the capital came from opium in the thirties, so she and her sisters were brought up like princesses. Her father encouraged her to follow her interest in pharmacy right up to the doctorate level. He thought she was going to start a retail chain, financed by his money. He didn’t know she’d fallen in love with drugs for
their own sake in her midteens. She was one of those people who see life in terms of chemicals at an early age, and there’s nothing you can do about it. She started one corner shop on Soi Twenty-three, which was closed most of the time while she experimented with her stock. After being patient for nearly a decade, the respectable drug companies wouldn’t supply her anymore, and she let the business go bankrupt, even though she’s fantastically rich. Her family have not disowned her—after all, she’s only got convictions for minor offenses, and it’s not certain she killed two of her husbands.”

  “Each of them died tragically in mysterious circumstances.”

  “Right. While she was out of the country. But HiSo is HiSo. As long as she plays the game and turns up in those amazing ball gowns at those society events, they’ll protect her. They may even be proud of her. How can you tell with the Chinese?”

  Lek and I fall to pondering in the taxi, which is speeding now on the highway to the airport. “When you think about the Fat Farang Case, though, and then you put Moi in it as a suspect, it does all seem to fall into place,” Lek opines with a yawn.

  “It does. I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of anyone in Thailand who could possibly have done it, and Mad Moi simply didn’t occur to me. Now that Sukum’s onto her, though, I’m wondering why I never thought of her.”

  “He’s going to claim all the credit, you do know that? Even though it was Nong who first mentioned Doctor Moi—if it weren’t for you, he wouldn’t even be thinking along those lines.”

  I sigh. “It doesn’t matter, Lek, it really doesn’t. I don’t want promotion anyway. I’d feel even more of a fraud than I feel now.”

  “Don’t talk like a fool, darling. The minute he gets his promotion they’ll start to put pressure on him to take money. White turns to gray at that level, and soon after that you get to black. They’ve only let him keep his innocence because he’s so junior. You watch, he’ll turn up to work one day in a Lexus, and you’ll know that’s another soul sold to the devil.”

  While we are leisurely discussing Sukum and his imminent forensic triumph, he calls on my cell phone: his name is flashing on and off to Dylan’s heartfelt There is too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. I wink at Lek.

  “I’ve traced her,” Sukum says.

  “Well done, Detective.”

  “She’s staying at the Somerset Maugham Suite at the Oriental.”

  “Ah! Old money! Don’t you love it? They always know how to hide in full view. When are you going to take her in?”

  “When are you free? They told me you’re on your way to the airport doing something dirty for Vikorn.”

  I frown at the phone. “Why do you need me, Detective? Call the media, do what Vikorn does, make a career-building event of it.”

  “Suppose she denies all involvement?”

  I cough. “Detective, you will have to do some work. She might fight against the prospect of death row—some do, you know.”

  “I know that,” he snaps. “I’m talking about how clever she is. She’s educated and thinks like a farang. I might not understand what she’s talking about. I want you to be there.”

  “Is it the LSD from last time that’s got you all nervous, Khun Sukum?”

  “You’re not kidding. Have you ever had someone slip you some acid and you think you’ve lost your mind for the rest of your life? And suppose she’s HIV-positive and she’s got spikes hidden in her hair like in that movie you made me watch.”

  “Hannibal? There were hair spikes laced with the AIDS virus?”

  “I’ve watched it five times now. She was a black American named Evelda Drumgo. That’s put me right off, I can tell you. I’m just not qualified to deal with sophisticated foreign women, I don’t have the exposure. I only know Thai housewives and factory workers, the other kinds are more your field.”

  I’m puzzled by his reluctance, given the decade he spent on the Mad Moi files. I shrug at Lek. “I might be a while. We’re not at the airport yet, and the traffic’s going to be pretty bad on the way back, I can tell from the way the cars are all slowing on the other side of the highway.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Suppose she makes a run for it?”

  “Then I can arrest her, can’t I? But she’s so cunning, I bet she won’t commit a single crime while I’m watching.”

  Lek can’t believe he said that and is repeating the phrase over and over and shaking his head while we arrive at the airport’s taxi drop-off.

  20

  They’re not supposed to keep a suspect for more than twenty-four hours without handing them over to the police. They’ve made an exception in Mary Smith’s case because they had to take her to the hospital for a laxative, where she was kept under tight supervision with a special toilet to catch the condoms. Now the condoms have all been sent off to forensics for tests and nobody thinks they contain anything less than high-quality smack.

  Immigration took the opportunity to throw Mary Smith in with another offender, a French woman who was caught with a small amount of cannabis. The French woman speaks perfect English, and Immigration secretly filmed and voice-recorded Mary’s night with her. I watch the part of the video where Mary slips a hand between the French woman’s thighs and they turn to kiss like old lovers.

  “Recidivists,” the customs officer says, “both of them. You can tell by looking. These girls love jail, they just don’t know that they love it.”

  Smith is in her midtwenties, longish, light brown hair which needs washing, crumpled backpacker pants and shirt. An unhealthy paleness haunts her otherwise unremarkable features; she looks like a young woman who is frequently sick from junk. She speaks English in two shades of gray: estuary and Cockney. During my interview with her, I understand completely where the customs officer is coming from. It’s not something you can explain to anyone who is not in the business, but cops come across it all the time: people in the grip of a psychological need for incarceration. It’s a fatal attraction like any other. Some people scare themselves to death with vertigo as a precursor to jumping off buildings; young men with a morbid fear of violence join the Marines and get themselves killed; there are leprophiles and AIDSphiles, most of whom succumb to their chosen diseases in the end; and there are recidivists, people who, from a fantastically early age, know that their destiny lies in prison. Mary Smith, for example, knows all about Thai jails, even though she’s never been in one. She knows they will likely hold her in the women’s holding prison at Thonburi, where Rosie is incarcerated. She also knows the name of the prison where she will likely serve out her time. She knows about the punishments, the occasional sexual assault by bull dykes, the likely effect eight or more years will have on her mind, and there is a quiet joy behind the shock, a slow-eyed relief that all the important decisions will be made by someone else from now on—and love will be simply a series of stolen opportunities with short shelf lives. The world recently got very simple for Mary Smith.

  I say, “Maybe I can help with the sentence. There’s a huge difference between eight years and twelve—believe me, I’ve seen it.”

  “What difference?”

  “Eight years, there’s still something left, some tiny memory of how to function in a free society, something you might just be able to build on—and you’re still quite young. In eight years you’ll be—let me see—”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Right. Thirty-six. Still of childbearing age. Still with a lot of future in front of you.”

  “I don’t want a future. I hate future. I definitely don’t give a fuck about having kids.”

  I nod sagely. “But twelve years, that’s something else, every programming you ever received out of jail, from birth onward, will have been erased from your mind. All of your responses, even the most basic, will have been replaced with jail responses, even down to using a toilet—you’re going to be doing it our way for the rest of your life.”

  “Our way?” She uses a sneer to convey the allegation of hypocrisy.r />
  I scratch my left ear. “Let’s cut the crap, Mary. Twelve years is too long. As the jail’s little farang whore you might just about get away with eight and still be viable, after that you’ll be some toothless toy for the dykes to play with, you won’t even get to choose who uses the dildo or where they shove it, much less what they make you do with your mouth. Better talk.”

  My plain words seem to have had an effect. “I don’t know anything. If I did I would have talked by now, wouldn’t I?”

  “Who told you where to go when you got to Bangkok?”

  “Someone on the road.”

  “Where did they tell you to go?”

  “Kaosan Road. Some little side street behind the Coca-Cola truck.”

  The Coca-Cola truck is famous; it hasn’t moved for more than thirty years. Actually, it’s a Pepsi-Cola truck, but we always think Coke. “Where were you when you heard about business to be had on Kaosan Road?”

  She shrugs. “Everybody knows. It’s one of those things people talk about on the road.”

  “Backpackers?”

  “Sure.”

  “But the precise address—where did you get that?”

  “Nepal. Kathmandu.”

  “From?”

  “The place where I was staying.”

  “What was the name?”

  “The Newar Guesthouse.”

  I let a couple of beats pass. “The Newar? Where’s that?”

  “Up the top of Thamel, just behind where they sell all those kukri knives.”