by John Burdett
"With a girlfriend like that, a lot of men might have it on the mind full-time."
Elijah eyes me sideways. "Fatima, she turn you on?"
"That's really her name? Fatima?"
"That's the one she gave." A slow, careful nod. "Too exotic for me. I like a more earthy mama, someone you can drink beer and watch TV with, who don't care if you fart. She kind of spooked me."
"He must have talked about her a lot."
Elijah downed another bottle. "Nope, not once. I guess he knew I thought he was kinda weird about that sort of thing. I had no idea who she was or what she looked like or even that she existed. All I had was a mobile number he sent me over the e-mail one time. I called it from New York after they told me he was dead. It was his mobile, but I figured someone might be using it. She answered and told me she'd meet me at the hotel after I landed. It was her idea to go to the boxing."
"You don't have an address?"
"Not even a phone number. I tried calling her again before you guys showed up, and there's a Thai voice telling me in English that the number's no longer available."
"First you were with her, the next thing you're with some Khmer?"
"She called them when I freaked a little at the boxing. I knew that friend of yours was wrong, Miss FBI. I have street instinct. Three of them arrived on bikes. She goes off with one of them and leaves the other two to mind me. They weren't such bad fellas. Maybe a little undisciplined."
"I can guarantee no problems for you if you want to talk a little about what your brother was up to. It might help find his killers."
"Been waiting for you to say that. Actually, I don't have a problem because I wasn't involved, whatever Miss Hot Pants might have insinuated. These days I work in a hermetically sealed environment. I don't risk contamination from anyone, not even blood relations. I sure don't risk doing business with a beginner, which was what Bill was. I just gave him some advice, that's all, the kind I hoped would keep him out of trouble. Guess he didn't take it, huh?"
"What kind of advice?"
Elijah is not as drunk as he claims. His vast body has now absorbed twelve bottles of beer, without much effect on his alertness. "Well, I guess he's dead, right? Nothing can hurt him now. He had some idea that meth could be safely imported into the States. What's that crazy name you got for it over here?"
"Yaa baa."
"Right. Great name, maybe we should call it that. He had all these detailed plans on how to smuggle yaa baa, through Hong Kong, through Shanghai, even through Tokyo. He was a real details man. He believed he had some special insight because of all his work at embassies and knowledge of how diplomatic immunity works. He talked just like any amateur who gets the bug. He got all excited because he had some contacts here, people who could bring in unlimited quantities at knockdown prices. I explained to him, I says: 'Billy, don't matter that you're not moving heroin, you're in the region of the Golden Triangle, you got more FBI, CIA, DEA per square inch out there than anywhere in the world. Not a good idea, Billy. Forget it.' When I saw he wasn't going to forget it, I made a few inquiries. I called him to give him some names and addresses of people out here with experience of moving stuff. I explain business to him. I say, 'Look, settle for a five percent handler's fee here in Bangkok, don't get involved in the overseas shipping, just move the stuff from address A in Bangkok to address B in Bangkok. So it doesn't make you rich overnight, you still get a good income, given the quantities you're talking about, and you sleep better at night. Maybe when you've been in the business a few years, maybe then you can think about something a little more ambitious.' I thought he got the point, but obviously I was wrong."
"Why d'you say that?"
"Sonchai, my man, he fucked up, didn't he? My kid brother did what any dumb, middle-aged desperado does who don't want to go on another learning curve. He jumped into the snake pit thinking he was going to solve his cash flow problem in one fell swoop. I seen it happen so often it's boring. The only fell swoops that work are the ones that have structure, that have been set up over a period of years, maybe decades. I know, I sat at the feet of black professors in the university of the penitentiary. But you can't explain that to a guy who secretly thinks he's superman, who spends his whole life looking in a mirror. And just so as we can remain friends, you and I, I'm going to anticipate your next question. No, I ain't gonna tell you who I told him to get in touch with out here."
"I wasn't going to ask," I say, hurt.
Another bottle empties into his mouth, with just a little spilling from the corners. "No, come to think of it, I don't believe you were. Accept my apologies for offending your professional pride. Where would you recommend to eat around here? Don't give me anything with chili, I'm a New Yorker."
Elijah is the reincarnation of a southern planter who treated his slaves well but was unable to transcend the racism of his times. He spent two incarnations as an African American, neither of them illustrious. Deep resentment toward the system carried over from those lifetimes and drove him to crime in this one. These perceptions came to me while he was cramming some stuffed potato skins into his mouth at a diner off Sukhumvit. We've come all the way across the city because this is the only New York-style deli I know. It is 3:21 a.m., but Elijah's jet lag makes him as fresh as a daisy. The deli, come to think of it, is not New York. It is sand floor and potted plants and there is chili on the menu, but Elijah has not noticed as he tucks into a forkful of quesadillas.
"See, I'm a child of the sixties. A black man in those far-off days had to make a decision early on in life: sport, religion, jazz or crime. Brother Billy was born five years later, and already things had started to change. It killed me at the time that my kid brother was a patriot. I still don't look on my way of earning a living as criminal. Where's the victim? I supply a demand. Can I help it if the psychology of modern America has created a demand for escape at any cost, particularly amongst the white yuppie class? Billy didn't see it that way, and the second time I went to the penitentiary he stopped talking to me. It's one of those things that just when I'm mellowing toward the good old U.S., Billy is developing a black power mentality. I guess he was always kinda slow on the uptake. He even talked about becoming a black Muslim. Maybe he did, he wouldn't have told me because I don't like Muslims and neither does Mother, who's one churchy nigger."
Elijah picked up a chicken leg and examined it for a moment. I said: "Did he talk to you about jade?"
He took a big chunk out of the thigh, chewed briefly and swallowed. "Jade? A precious stone, right, from Laos or Burma or something? He mentioned it. It was a kind of hobby of his. He wouldn't have talked about it too much to me, because I never shared his taste in jewelry. That was another thing about him. Nigger can wear gold, pearls, what the hell he likes, if he does it to strut his stuff, that's okay. But Billy was serious about jewelry from an early age. It was small, you get what I'm saying? Part of his smallness, which I didn't appreciate."
"D'you know who Sylvester Warren is?" A shake of the head while he's stripping the rest of the bone with his teeth. "A billionaire jeweler and art dealer, knows presidents. He comes here once a month."
Elijah's face is blank. He shakes his head again before starting in on the nachos. With his mouth full: "We got a lot of billionaires who have to leave America to get their kicks. It ain't like it used to be. We got media, mind police, electronic surveillance. White boy like that who knows presidents can't afford even to look at his secretary the wrong way. They ain't as broad-minded as us niggers. They really fucked themselves all up. No wonder he comes here every month, this Warren. Did he know Billy?"
"They exchanged e-mails."
"Think he was the one had him killed?"
I shrug. "No one can think of a motive."
Elijah pauses with a forkful of potato salad. "Me either. Let's face it, Billy tried all his life to be as big as his body, but at the end of the day he was a little guy. A sergeant in the Marines who liked to hire cheap pussy out of Third World go-go bars. He wasn
't important enough for a rich white boy to kill."
"Tell me this. Was your brother more than averagely scared of snakes?"
"More than average? I dunno. I guess every nigger in Harlem's scared of snakes. The African jungle is quite a few generations back. Sure, he was scared of snakes, same as me. I used to tease him that if he went ahead and joined the army he would be sent to the jungles of Southeast Asia where boa constrictors roamed on the loose. Freaked him out but it seems like I was right."
"Do you intend to avenge your brother's death, Mr. Bradley?"
My question, perfectly reasonable to me, has astonished him. He puts down his fork and pushes his seat back a foot to stare at me. "You mean like a vendetta?" He scratches his head by way of answer. "Only time I had anyone rubbed out was because they double-crossed me. In the business, when that happens you don't have any choice, but to tell you the truth I been regretting it ever since. I'm not a man of violence. Most of the time, being this big, I don't need to be."
"You didn't love him?"
"I don't know. He was my brother but we weren't close. I came over to sort out his estate. I get the feeling we're dealing with a cultural difference, here, Detective. Only Sicilians do that vendetta stuff in the U.S. We blacks prefer to rely on the rule of law. What you gonna do when you find who did it?"
"Kill them," I say with a smile.
It is 4:32 a.m. by the time I reach my hovel. As usual, I had forgotten to take my mobile with me. It bleeps while I'm falling asleep and the screen tells me there's a message. I fumble with the controls until the message appears:
River City, 2nd level, Warren Fine Art and Jewelry. Opens 10 a.m. See you there. K.J. P.S. Dress up.
Between the two incompatible worlds of waking and sleeping my mind reverts to the dildo garden at the Hilton. Meditation is just a way of preferring reality to fantasy, as our abbot used to say. He would not have been put out by that small forest of cocks, though he might have had a problem with the Hilton. Like many of our country abbots, he retained much of the shamanism of pagan times and liked to predict the future. Once he foretold the winning numbers in the national lottery, just for fun, but hid the paper on which he made the prediction until after the deadline for purchasing tickets, so as not to corrupt his monks. There will be a massive shift of power from West to East in the middle of the twenty-first century, caused not by war or economics but by a subtle alteration in consciousness. The new age of biotechnology will require a highly developed intuition which operates outside of logic, and anyway the internal destruction of Western society will have reached such a pass that most of your resources will be concentrated on managing loonies. There will be TV news pictures of people fleeing from supermarkets and pressing their hands to their heads, unable to take the banality anymore. The peoples of Southeast Asia, who have never been poisoned by logical thought, will find themselves in the driver's seat. It will be like old times, if your time line stretches back a few thousand years.
I was flattered that the abbot chose me rather than Pichai with whom to share this side of his enlightenment, though the finer points which enable one to predict a lottery he kept to himself (on the other hand he initiated Pichai into the deepest mysteries that exist concerning the relationship between the so-called living and the so-called dead).
There won't be another world war, but by the middle of this century every country except Iceland and New Zealand is involved in a more or less violent dispute with neighbors over water rights. Papua New Guinea beats Argentina 3-1 in the 2056 World Cup final. How to Deal with Crazies Without Turning into One tops the best-seller lists throughout 2038. Marijuana (universally legalized) overtakes alcohol as the recreational drug of choice in Europe, even in France where legislators rush to bring it under the appellation controlee laws (Champagne Jaune, Bordeaux Blond, Noir de Bourgogne, etc.).
34
This morning I woke early and spent an hour in the Emporium building on Sukhumvit, before the shops opened. I see that the explosion of color which was really started by Yves Saint Laurent has migrated to Italy, mostly to Versace and Armani, while Saint Laurent himself has returned to blacks and browns. Ermenegildo Zegna on the other hand has never abandoned the glazed beiges which work so well on his superfine wools. I spare a moment to drool over his camel double-breasted blazer with mock tortoiseshell buttons (about U.S.$1,500), but today it is the atelier of Armani which has my attention with its new collection of silk-satin woven ties, cashmere one-button sports jackets and plaid four-button double-breasted suits. It is a subtler, suaver art than the late Versace's, but who could deny the elan, the very Italian playfulness (so close to Thai), in those houndstooth check shirts, wrinkle-cotton striped dress shirts and wool crepe skirts in the Armani window? My real vice, though, is shoes, and I spend most of the time ogling the Bally collection (dull-glow mahogany slip-ons, some very daring perforated brogues with echoes of Gatsby-I saw the film-and some utterly fantastic women's stuff with heels and points no one else would get away with), not that I neglect Fila, Ferragamo, Gucci or the very exotic Baker-Benjes, which has only recently appeared in our kingdom. I would like to claim it is my farang contamination in the blood which is responsible for this defilement and debilitating disease, but the truth is I caught it from Truffaut and Fritz, both consummate narcissists in different ways and hypersharp dressers, who intervened in my development at a crucial juncture. The FBI's instruction to "dress up" has thrown me into a crisis of inferiority which will take some meditating to deal with. I'm fed up with being poor, at least the non-Buddhist side of me is, and feeling pretty damn low when I take the motorcycle taxi to the Hilton to meet Kimberley, who has hired her usual car to take us to River City.
In the back of the car I explain: "River City is where the rich and dumb go to buy Oriental art. You pay a hundred percent markup for the sensitive placing of the piece, the backlighting, the mincing salesperson. It's a shopping mall for art tasters and looks exactly like the one near you." The tension in my voice is a direct product of my pressed khaki shirt, white pants, polished black lace-up shoes (all items generic and the shoes particularly ugly). The FBI has relegated me to the position of Indian guide by the time we reach the car park.
Why do I have the feeling she planned this moment while she was sitting in her office in Quantico and fantasizing about the glory she would bask in when she bagged Sylvester Warren? Her hair is blond again this morning, she is wearing wraparound Gucci sunglasses, a black YSL business suit with trousers, white shirt open to a string of pearls. Tiny pearls.
"I'm here on a buying trip from New York," she explains. "You're my man Friday."
We ride the escalator to the second level and there is Warren Fine Art in triple A position, in your face as you step off. Jones was wrong about the opening time. It's the kind of shop that doesn't open until eleven, when an overdressed beautiful person will unlock it with a yawn. Smart buyers do not browse, they make an appointment. For the right smart buyer the beautiful person would open the store at midnight. We pause at the window long enough for Jones to show off her expertise.
"Some not bad stuff here. That Buddha head is definitely Khmer, someone ripped it off from Angkor Wat. If Warren didn't have connections he'd be in jail, the son of a bitch." We take the ten or so paces to the next window, which is the jewelry and jade section. It is not like any of the jewelry shops in Chinatown, or anywhere else in Krung Thep. The work is almost all jade, often mounted on gold. Gold and jade necklaces, gold and jade bracelets, earrings. Arising out of the sea of green are some of the more substantial pieces, which cleverly highlight the rest, giving the impression that the whole window was once guarded by imperial eunuchs in the Forbidden City. "Will you look at that condor plaque! See the bald head, the creases in the neck denoting the bird's spare skin in that area? Just look how accurately a Neolithic person, illiterate, probably with a vocabulary of a few hundred words, has observed a creature, stylized it and turned it into art without sacrificing accuracy. Most college graduates to
day couldn't do that. They wouldn't even understand what I'm talking about."
I spare her a quick glance. Here is yet another personality, and a surprising one. I have been puzzling and meditating on the karmic connection between Jones and Warren without being able to figure it out. It is certain, though, that Warren has influenced her from a distance. It could have been him talking. In her compartmentalized farang mind she cannot see the significance of this, she sincerely believes she has become an expert on Far Eastern art exclusively to nail Warren. She would see it as evidence of pathetic weakness on her part to acknowledge how Warren has broadened and deepened her mind, even before she ever met him. From afar he has changed her destiny forever. With whom in the Bureau could she share this new passion for Oriental art? Even her family sooner or later will think her strange, and this strangeness will be her path. I dare not warn her that she is destined to return to my country again and again. I predict the allure will work through her pussy, at least at first. The path to the farang heart lies invariably through the genitalia.
"Wow! That tiger is priceless," Jones explains. "It's the big come-on, the piece which tells you this guy is the king of jade." Her voice has risen an octave when she says: "See how the sculptor has bunched the muscles, giving that impression of power, and look at the harmony. Limbs, haunches, back, shoulder, stomach-synchronized, masterful, harmonious."
"It's not green," I object.
"That's the point. After about a thousand years jade loses its color. That tiger goes back to the Early Western Zhou dynasty. He would never sell it, I bet. To anyone who knows anything, it's as intimidating as hell." She shakes her head. "I'm surprised he's got the guts to show some of this stuff. Look at that crouching dragon in mutton-fat nephrite and those thrush-breast freckles-think of the genius it took to see that dragon in the crude stone. That chatelaine is impressive, too, and look at that openwork plaque with peonies. I don't know, this is more than just a collector, this is a curator of his own museum." She takes the two steps back to the center of the window. "That tiger, though, it's still the best piece on display. It's more than just a great piece, it's world class, the stone equivalent of the Mona Lisa-if you like the Mona Lisa, which I don't, personally. Oh, look, he's acknowledging his Chinese connections. See that brilliant piece of calligraphy hanging on the wall consisting of a single pictograph? That's the Chinese character yu."