by John Burdett
He goes to his desk, unlocks a drawer, comes back with a ball of newspaper. As he unravels the ball I notice the newspaper is in a foreign script. Not Thai and not English. Under the newspaper, a brown and black piece of rock roughly the shape of a pyramid about six inches high. I peer at the rock, then use a piece of the newspaper to hold it up and turn it over. Most of the rock is covered in mud, lichen and jungle scum, but there are some scrape marks on the bottom of it, exposing a greenish tint of core.
"Jade. The scrape marks are from potential buyers testing the hardness." I examine the newspaper. "Laotian script, very close to Thai but not the same."
"Can you read the date?"
"No."
"Okay, we'll make a copy and e-mail it to Quantico. We should have an answer in a couple of days."
"May I also have a copy?"
Nape takes the newspaper and goes off to get copies. Rosen and I look at each other. I say: "Did Bradley have an apartment in the city?"
Rosen rubs the back of his ear with his thumb. "Long-termers generally rent a room or even an apartment, usually for R and R purposes, even though officially they live at the embassy. The only condition is that they tell us where it is. Bradley filed an address on Soi 21 off Sukhumvit, but when we checked a couple of hours ago, we discovered he hadn't been there for four years." I digest this in silence. "So I guess we don't know where he lived." I nod while Rosen looks away, toward the football on the filing cabinet. "If I received hints that Washington doesn't really want too deep an investigation…"
I shrug. "Detective Pichai Apiradee was my soul brother." This information apparently does not answer Rosen's question. I try again. "I'm going to kill whoever did it. There won't be a trial."
Fortunately, at that moment Nape returns with the photocopies, one of which he hands to me, the other to Rosen, whose mouth is hanging open. I stand up and force a smile. "How about a wager, gentlemen? A thousand baht says that I will find out the date of the newspaper before you do."
Nape grins and shakes his head. "Not me. I know you'll win."
Rosen looks at him as if he has committed treason. "Bullshit. I'll tell them it's urgent. We'll have an answer by five tonight, Thai time."
At least I've found a way of closing the interview with reasonable elegance. Nape accompanies me to the gate of the embassy and returns me safely to Thailand. The big smile has gone from his face. He looks older in the cloying heat, less pure. As we stand on either side of the turnstile, he licks his lips and says: "You're gonna snuff 'em, aren't you?" I stare at him for a moment, then turn to look for a motorbike taxi. It is two minutes before 3 p.m.
Monsieur Truffaut was probably my favorite. We were unable to love him because he was so old, but with hindsight it is clear that of all of them, he alone gave more than he took. He gave us Paris, after all, and a smattering of French.
8
I told the kid on the bike to take me to Nana Entertainment Plaza, a short ride away. It was eleven minutes past 3 p.m. when we arrived, and the plaza was still sleeping off the night before.
Pichai would always make fun of the way I could not stand to work Vice. I guess his background didn't affect him the way it affected me, but just now, with the courtyard mostly empty and the three tiers of bars, short-time hotels and brothels quiet in the hot afternoon, I appreciated the feeling of familiarity that came over me. I may not like it, as someone may not like the street where they were brought up, but there's no denying the depth of understanding, the knowledge, the intimacy. Maybe on such a black day this was the one place that might bring some relief?
A few girls were already hanging out at the street-level bars, chatting about the night before, comparing stories of the men who paid their bar fines and took them back to their rooms, moaning about the ones who just flirted and groped, then disappeared without buying them a drink. I knew how they liked to talk about the quirks of farangs whose preferences can be so different from our own. Great macho men who only want to suck big toes, or even be whipped. Men who cry and talk about their wives. Men who, fully clothed, look like the very best the West has to offer, yet somehow collapse at the sight of a naked brown girl waiting on a hotel bed. I knew every story, every nuance, every trick of the trade in which I have never partaken, not once, not even when Pichai went through his whoring phase. I paused to watch the girls coming to work, each of whom raised her hands in prayer to her forehead in order to mindfully wai the Buddha shrine which stands festooned with marigolds and orchids in the north corner of the courtyard, and I could not help thinking of my mother; then I climbed the stairs to the second tier.
I was looking for one of the larger bars which had already opened their doors and found Hollywood 2, one of its double doors propped open with a wastebin, houselights bright inside while women in overalls wiped the tables and mopped the floors. The aroma of pine cleaning fluid blended with stale beer, cigarettes and cheap perfume. There was a big two-level turntable with stainless steel uprights for the girls to cavort around while it turned, but it was empty and motionless at that time. I walked in and knew that the woman who was replenishing the beers on the shelves behind one of the bars was the mamasan who organizes the girls, advises them on every aspect of the trade, even the most intimate, who listens to their problems, helps them when they fall pregnant or contemplate suicide. She would tell the girls to walk out if the client refused to use a condom, and to demand extra for unusual services-or decline (Italians, French and Americans especially are known for their sodomizing ways). A good mamasan looks ahead to when the girls will have to retire in their mid-thirties, if not before; some of them even teach the girls English and pay for secretarial courses, although such enlightenment is rare. It was not enlightenment which shone from this woman's eyes: broad, tough, about fifty with a nut-brown face and a permanent scowl.
"We shut. Come back sik o'clock."
She had taken me for a farang. "I'm a cop," I said in Thai, flashing my ID. A change of attitude, but not much.
"What you want, Khun Cop? The boss pays protection, you can't hassle me."
"This isn't a bust."
She looked around for more cops. Finding none, she sneered. "The girls aren't ready yet. The ones upstairs are still asleep and the others haven't arrived. Why have you come so early? You want a free fuck, just because you're a cop? What if my boss tells his protector?"
"I just want a favor."
"Sure. Every man wants a favor."
"I want a Lao girl."
She smirked. "Lao girl? We got thirty percent Lao girl. What kind you want? Tall, short, big tits, small tits-no blondes, though." She cackled at her own joke. "No blond Laos here. If you want blonde you got to have Russian."
"I want one who can read and write. Actually, read is good enough."
"You mean not a tribeswoman straight out of the jungle-we have a few of those, like all the bars do." She frowned. "What you up to, Khun Cop?"
"Can you help, yes or no?"
The mamasan shrugged and yelled out the name of a girl. Someone yelled back, and a young woman appeared dressed in a white towel tucked under her arms, her long brown legs ending in bare feet. "Get Dou, she's in room three," the mamasan told her.
Ten minutes later Dou appeared in a cotton frock, a pleasant-faced young woman about twenty years old, with a broad, friendly smile and a thick Laotian accent. She was excited, thinking me an early customer. I smiled back, showed her a hundred-baht note and the photocopy Nape gave me. She scanned it quizzically. "I only want to know the date on it."
She made big eyes. This was the easiest hundred baht she had ever earned. "2539 May 17." She read it off in the order in which it was printed.
"Thanks." I handed over the hundred baht.
I told the mamasan to dig out her telephone, which she produced from behind the bar. In my head I worked out the year in the Christian era; farangs never like to realize we are five hundred years ahead of them.
Rosen had given me his business card with his mobile telepho
ne number. I dialed the number and when he answered said: "May 17, 1996."
A pause. "If Quantico confirms, I owe you a thousand." Another pause. "Did you say 1996?"
I confirmed and hung up. It was 3:31 p.m.
Out on the street I made my way through the heat to the sky train station, past stalls selling rip-offs of designer handbags, T-shirts, jeans, shorts, swimwear. This stretch of stalls was owned and run by deaf-mutes who communicated across the pavement in their vivacious sign language as I passed. There were illegal copies of CDs, DVDs, videos and tapes, too. The whole street is a mecca for anyone seriously interested in law enforcement, but the deaf-mutes never seem to worry.
9
Like a lot of people, I'm a fan of the sky train on the rare occasions when it's of any use to me. The logic of the system is unimpeachable: to beat the traffic, rise above it. It was one of those ventures founded on foreign capital and foreign expertise for which our politicians developed a suspicious passion. For what felt like decades whole sections of the city's roads were clogged or shut off while armies of men and women in yellow plastic hats built their concrete pillars and their state-of-the-art elevated tracks. Now the project is complete in its first phase and the gigantic city has swallowed it up as if it weren't there at all. We all scratched our heads. All that for only two lines?
Riding it is a distinct pleasure, though. You get a great view of the city from a flying compartment with glacial air-conditioning. It's also a study in bankruptcy if you take note of the great skeletons of unfinished high-rises that loom out of the chaos from time to time, monuments to a building frenzy that chilled with the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and never heated up again. Now these new Stonehenges are home to beggars and bag people. From the train you can see their hammocks, their dogs and their washing in the honeycombs of concrete caves, sometimes a monk meditating in his saffron robes. Even though a taxi would have been cheaper, I ride the train all the way to Saphan Taksin and get a boat to take me the rest of the way up the Chao Phraya River to Dao Phrya Bridge. The river is noisy and busy with barges and longtail boats and I cannot help but remember the fun we used to have on it, Pichai and I…
It is early evening by the time I reach the bridge. The Mercedes is cordoned off by means of iron stakes and orange tape, guarded by two young constables who sit on the car, one on the hood, the other on the roof. The one on the hood sits cross-legged and stares as I approach. I snap at him to get off the car and look like a real policeman. Now the two cops are scrambling to wai me, placing their palms together mindfully near their foreheads and bowing. "How long have you been here?"
"Eight hours."
"Anybody come to take statements from the squatters under the bridge?"
The boys shake their heads. I make a quick tour of the car, looking in from the outside only. I notice that the back seat has been folded to make a clear flat surface from the hatchback door to the backs of the front seats. A cell phone lies abandoned on the floor by the front passenger seat. Nevertheless, the car will have to wait. The car will not deteriorate as fast as people's memories.
The wasteland between the Mercedes and the squatter huts is intermittently illuminated by lights from traffic passing overhead. Under the bridge, there is a homely glow from electric lights crudely hooked up to the power cables which run under the arch. People are sitting on bamboo mats eating. There are some brilliantly lit cooking pots with women squatting over them, men dressed only in shorts sitting cross-legged on the ground and playing cards, drinking from plastic cups. There are a couple of televisions, too, flickering with their ever-changing images on trestle tables on which women are preparing food.
I cross the wasteland and squat beside one of the circles of men, who take no notice of me. A stack of banknotes waits beside each man, held down by a stone. I pick up one of the plastic cups and sniff. Rice moonshine. I look around to try to locate the still. I guess it will be in one of the larger huts, lost in darkness further under the bridge.
"Tell me, brother, who is the headman?"
The card player grunts, and nods toward a large hut. I walk over, knock on the door. I smell the heavy, sweet odor of fermented rice cooking. An aggressive yell from inside the hut, to which I reply: "Please open the door, brother."
The door opens and a balding man in his fifties stands there. Behind him, the massive terra-cotta urn standing over a small charcoal fire, a pipe sticking out three-quarters of the way up, an aluminum dish full of water covering the urn. The alcohol would condense on the underside of the dish, be caught and drip out through the pipe. The pipe leads to a crude cloth filter. I show my police ID.
The man shrugs. "We pay protection."
"I'm sure. And for the gambling?"
"No one gambles here."
I nod gravely. "Who do you pay your protection to?"
The man draws himself up straight. "Police Colonel Suvit, superintendent of District 15."
"That's good. Do you think the Colonel would like to be investigated by the American FBI?"
"The who?"
"I come in peace, but I need your help. I'm not going to write anything down. An American was murdered today, a black farang."
"He died of snake bites. It happens."
"Murdered. The snakes also killed my soul brother, the detective who was my partner."
The man looks me up and down with more interest, now that a matter of the heart has been mentioned. "Your soul brother? I'm sorry. You're going to avenge him?"
"Of course."
"I think you'll have trouble. I wasn't here, but I've heard a gang came. Young men on motorbikes."
"Who says so?"
"Old Tou. He was sitting smoking when the car arrived, followed by the motorbikes."
"I have to speak to Old Tou."
The headman struggles with a smirk. "I think you'll have trouble." He beckons for me to follow and we trudge over the uneven ground to the least well-appointed of all the huts. Some thatch made of leaves on a bamboo frame rests on walls of battered aluminum steamer trunks no higher than four feet. I have to wonder if a truck dropped the trunks over the bridge one fine day, when Tou was young. "Help me."
I help him lift the entire roof and set it on the ground. Between the walls an old man, gaunt and gray, snores from deep in his throat. "Too much moonshine," the headman says, as if speaking of a noxious substance beyond his knowledge. "Want me to wake him?" The headman pulls away one of the trunks and kicks Old Tou in the calf without interrupting the snoring. He tries a few kicks to the rump, each one harder than the last, before I say: "That's enough." We replace the old man's roof. "When does he wake up, if ever?"
"He generally appears about midday-that's when he starts on the moonshine. He carries on drinking until he's like this. I guess he'll be dead soon."
"I'll come back tomorrow at noon. I want him sober-don't give him any moonshine. Okay?" The man nods, a slight smile on his face. "Didn't anyone else see anything?" The headman looks away, toward the canal. "Ask them." He waves a hand toward the groups of card players and the women squatting over their cooking pots. I know it is hopeless. Only a drunk who expected to die within the week might tell the truth to the police. I start back toward the road. "Make sure he's sober," I tell the headman. "I don't think your Colonel Suvit wants a team of FBI agents crawling over the place, checking on the moonshine and the gambling-and the yaa baa."
"Nobody here does yaa baa," the headman says reproachfully. "That's a killer drug."
I take a cab to the river and ride back to my project in a small longtail boat empty except for me, the boatman and two monks; we roar past other longtails and rice barges almost invisible in the night. I let the monks go first when we arrive, watching the older one carefully arrange his robes so they do not catch as he clambers onto the ancient wooden jetty which lies in darkness except for a single gas lamp blazing from one of the woodpiles. The monks pass through this magic circle of white light and disappear into the darkness beyond. I walk on unpaved paths bet
ween squatter settlements until I reach my project.
The kid is there lounging under the awning, but one of his friends speaks to him when he sees me coming. The kid immediately jumps up and follows me into the building. I pay him twelve hundred baht for three yaa baa pills, even though he offers to give me them for free. I tell him I'm not that kind of cop as I hand over the money. Outside, there is a roar of a bike more powerful than anything the motorbike chauffeurs own, and the kid and I both step out. The kid's jaw drops at this vision of an equivalent tribesman from the distant future. The rider is all in black leather with upholstered knee and shoulder pads and a tinted full-face helmet that looks like he bought it this morning, on a 1,200 cc Yamaha that probably does a hundred in second gear. His back bears the Day-Glo insignia of Federal Express. He doesn't need to say anything as he gets off the bike and pulls off his helmet, he is the man. A little of his glory rubs off on me when he makes it clear that I'm the reason he's here.
The bubblepack I sign for is A4 size and comes from the United States Embassy. Inside, a thousand-baht note wrapped around a Motorola cell phone with its battery charger and manual and six three-by-five photos of Bradley. On the back of one of his cards Rosen had written: "Date confirmed. Figured you and I would both benefit from the cell phone and I guess you forgot to ask for the pix. The new help arrives tomorrow. Keep the phone with you. Tod."
The kid says: "Check how many units it's got." I don't know how to do that so I give it to him. He presses a few buttons and shrugs. "Only eight hundred baht. Don't call San Francisco." I try to kick him but miss as he walks back to his sun bed.
10
Back in my room, the desolation hits me like a brick in the face. I stand in front of my picture of His Beloved Majesty the King and burst into tears.