Bangkok 8 sj-1

by John Burdett

  "But we don't know that Bradley knew… everything that might have been on Warren's mind."

  I sigh. To me it is obvious, but intuition clearly plays no part in American law enforcement. "No, except that Bradley's knowing would have been an overwhelming motive for killing him. Anyway, look at the change of tone, starting with phase two. Can you imagine Warren expressing that kind of boyish excitement if it wasn't over something really different? This guy has been in the gem trade all his life-how is someone like Bradley going to get him all excited about copying a jade figure like the horse and rider?"

  Jones is shaking her head. I check her eyes and realize that she has still not plumbed the unspeakable depths, which is just as well. There is a lot more work to do. The snakes remain a problem and I do want to know what Warren did that Vikorn and Suvit don't want me to know about.

  While Jones returns to the embassy to retrieve photos of Gladys Pierson, I leave the station to use an Internet cafe to check the Bangkok Post, an English-language daily which is published on the Net in its entirety and has an excellent archive going back ten years. As I patiently click through the thousands of articles and reports responding to the keyword "murder" I know I'm wasting my time. I key in "Russian prostitutes," and the name of Andreev Iamskoy immediately pops up. The ways of karma are mysterious and implacable. Convinced I will not be able to live out this lifetime without another brutal session with Iamskoy, I give up on the Internet, pay fifty baht for fifty minutes' use and while I'm waiting for change cast my eyes over the rest of the users sitting at the twenty or so monitors in the shop. They are all women between the ages of eighteen and thirty and they are helping each other out with the English. "Thank you for-allai?" "Money." "Okay, thank you for money." "Thank you, darling, for money." Giggles.

  Back at the station the FBI, who has mastered the art of riding the motorcycle taxis, has managed to return alive from her embassy. While the Monitor looks on with glistening eyes we compare pictures of a naked Gladys Pierson with a naked Fatima. Jones explains that Pierson used such pictures extensively as part of her marketing. We place them side by side and put a sheet of paper over their faces, which do not resemble each other. Jones and I exchange glances.

  "The same!" the Monitor says. "Same body! Even same thing in her belly button." It's better than Space Invaders. Jones takes out another picture, postmortem, of Pierson lying facedown on the mortician's table. The Monitor's eyes are still glistening. I look away.

  "Is it your theory that he was having sex with her while he was doing this? I thought a bullwhip was very long?"

  "We made a lot of tests. You're quite right, the whip would have needed to have been at least six feet for this kind of penetration. We think he had an assistant."

  "Oh," I say. "An assistant?"

  "There are people who would do that. Women as well as men. And don't forget how rich the jeweler is. Also, you see how regular the ruts are? Whoever did it knew how to handle a whip. When I look at this picture I always think of the Marquis de Sade with his personal valet." Jones takes out another picture. Pierson has been turned over on the table.

  "Breasts as well?"

  "Correct. Can you send this creep off on an errand before I punch him?"

  "Go get us some coffee," I tell the Monitor.

  40

  We are so accustomed to sitting together in the back of Jones' hired car, it has become our equivalent of sitting on a sofa and watching TV together. We have progressed from flirtation to sexless tolerance with no passionate coupling in between. I think this might be an example of postindustrial romance. This thought is not canceled out by the Monitor, who sits in the front passenger seat munching fat pork sausages which he made us stop for at a cooked-food stall. He is like a nightmare offspring who was precipitated rather than conceived.

  "If I've understood why we're going to Pattaya, I'm wondering how you intend to sideline the Monitor," Jones murmurs into my ear.

  "I have a plan."

  "I thought maybe you did." A yawn. "So what's he like, this Iamskoy? Another urka gangster with Cyrillic tattoos on his forehead and a sales brochure that includes weapons-quality plutonium?"

  "Not quite."

  Pattaya is a beach resort which would be about an hour's drive from Krung Thep if it were ever possible to make the journey without traffic snarl-ups. It is also the place where the Industry reveals itself for what it is: the Industry. Jones has brought her Lonely Planet guidebook, from which she quotes:

  The sex industry's annual turnover is nearly double the Thai government's annual budget. (Wow!) Only an estimated 2.5 percent of all Thai sex workers work in bars and 1.3 percent in massage parlors. The remaining 96.2 percent work in cafes and barbershops and brothels only rarely patronized by non-Thai clients. In fact most of the country's sex industry is invisible to the visiting foreigner and it is thought that Thai-to-non-Thai transactions represent less than 5 percent of the total.

  Jones closes the book and looks at me with an expression I've never seen on her face before: humility? "Prostitution was never my bag. I studied the law on it, of course, and know how to bust a streetwalker in the States, and I know a lot about the career of Gladys Pierson, but I never really went into it sociologically. This is one hell of a phenomenon you have over here. I wonder if it's ever been this big, in the history of the world? I think it must have very complex sociological origins. I didn't tell you, but when I visited Nana that time I saw a young American man, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, very very good-looking, a real pinup, except he'd lost both arms in an accident. The girls didn't treat him any differently than anyone else. There was nothing forced about it either, they asked how he'd lost his arms, played with his stumps-broke all the rules of social etiquette-groped him and asked if he wanted to take them to his hotel. He was grinning like a cat and at the same time there were tears in his eyes. You didn't need to be a psychology major to read his mind. He'd come halfway round the world to be treated like just another guy. I couldn't detect an atom of physical revulsion or patronizing attitude in any of the girls. It's like, I guess you don't have the same problem with physical deformity as we do? Those were young, beautiful, perfectly formed women, and they didn't bat an eye."

  I don't really know how to reply, although this is an observation one hears from time to time. The amputee is a standard visitor to Nana. Not only amputees; men unacceptably short in the cultures of narcissism whence they hail will be snapped up by our accommodating women (who are likely to be as short or shorter). Chronic alcoholism might be a form of leprosy in your fastidious country, farang, with us it is the mildest of ailments, hardly worth a mention. Nor are buckteeth, false teeth, gray hair, no hair or clubfeet any impediment to admission to our Oriental Democracy of Flesh.

  All of a sudden, just as we're coming into the suburbs of Pattaya, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Jones lays a hand on mine. This is not a flirtatious gesture, although affectionate. I would say it was almost pitying. "Sonchai, I think I understand the case so far. Not as much as you do, but almost. You're gonna have to tell me what you expect of me with regard to what happens next. That's only fair. I've been thinking about you and about the case and about Thailand, and I'm still here. I haven't fled back to the States, or complained about you to the head of the FBI, or shot you, or even kicked you in the balls. I'm still here. If you want me to stay, you better level with me."

  "You know who did it?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you know why she's also innocent in every human definition."

  "But not in any legal definition."

  "I'm talking personal morality."

  "That's exactly what we're taught to avoid at the Academy. We call it getting creative. It's a no-no. It's the law that counts."

  "Culture shock. It's getting creative that counts. Even Vikorn, whom you despise, he has a strong personal morality from which he never waivers. He's led me in shoot-outs which could easily have gotten him killed. He's a brave chieftain. Maybe he's a dinosa
ur to you, but there are reasons why we love him. We don't love cowards over here."

  "You want me to keep my mouth shut?"

  "Yes."

  "You'll give me Warren?"

  "I don't know if I can do that. Maybe he belongs to me. He didn't kill your partner."

  "He didn't kill yours either."

  "Karmically he's responsible."

  "That's an easy argument to make. It's also easy to turn around. Maybe he killed me in a hundred previous lifetimes. Maybe he owes me this time. Anyone who hunts human beings will tell you, most of the time it's not personal, but sometimes there's that special chemistry. I want Warren, Sonchai. Do we have a deal?"

  "I'll think about it."

  We have turned into Pattaya and drift slowly in the stream of traffic along the main waterfront avenue.

  "Did I really just see a bar called the Cock and Pussy Bar?" Jones wants to know. Her mood has changed dramatically, she seems angry. "Is there anything here not dedicated to sex?"

  She has a point. Bar after bar line the street opposite the sea, and behind every bar a team of girls who will do anything you want for five hundred baht so long as it doesn't hurt. We are a peace-loving people, we don't like pain. We don't like people who inflict it, either. We do not give law, sex and death more importance than those delusions deserve, but deliberately to inflict suffering is seriously un-Buddhist.

  Turning away from the bars, back to me and the case, Jones says: "Have you any explanation at all for why Fatima should be in Warren's shop?"

  "No. None at all. I agree it's a puzzle."

  "Like the puzzle of how the python?"

  "The problem of how the python is second only to why the python."

  "I know."

  On Naklua Road I tell the driver to let the Monitor and me out of the car. We walk quickly in the heat toward a shop whose window is packed with pirated CDs, most of them games.

  "I know why you're doing this," the Monitor confides.

  "You do?"

  "You're going to fuck the farang woman, aren't you? Are you going to a hotel?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "I don't want to waste your money."

  "How so?"

  "PlayStation 1 is totally out of date. Okay, it's cheap, but it has no value, you couldn't sell it secondhand."

  "And the others?"

  "Microsoft Xbox is good but it doesn't have the range of software."

  "And GameCube?"

  "GameCube is okay, but it's out of date."

  "Leaving?"

  "PlayStation 2. It's awesome. You can download from the Net, it plays everything designed for PS1, it plays DVD sex movies, DVD games."

  "Do you need a computer?"

  The Monitor looks at me strangely. "You plug it into a TV, like all the game consoles."

  "Oh, I didn't know. How much is PS2?"

  "Seventeen thousand baht."

  "Seventeen?"

  "You want me out of the way with my mouth shut, right?"

  "Right."

  In the store the Monitor starts into an arcane argument with a young shop assistant about the latest version of a game called Final Fantasy. The clerk, a boy about fifteen with ring-riveted eyebrows, shows disdain. It seems he favors Dragon Warrior VII, and even Paper Mario, rather than Final Fantasy, a position the Monitor cannot relate to. "Are you kidding? Paper Mario better than Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy is awesome."

  A shrug from the boy. "Look, I work here, what do you think I do all day? I play the games. What do you do?"

  "I'm a cop."

  "So, how would you be at the same level as me? I'm telling you, DWVII is more awesome and you get a hundred hours."

  The Monitor is seriously nonplussed. "What's the ending like?"

  "Awesome."

  "What about shoot-outs, what's the best in your opinion?"

  "In my opinion? How can you do better than Unreal Championship. The guns…"

  "Awesome?"

  "Awesome."

  "How many games do you throw in with the machine?"

  "Usually five, but since you're a cop, you can have ten."

  The Monitor explains to me that the selection is going to take some time. "What about porn?" he asks the shop assistant.

  "We have everything. What do you need, straight or gay? S M? Lesbian? Whips and candle wax? Gang bangs? What race, farang, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Latino?"

  "Latino? What is Latino porn like?"

  "Awesome."

  The Monitor gives me the nod and allows the shop assistant to take him to one of the booths where a PlayStation 2 is already set up. I watch while the clerk loads a disc and the screen immediately shows a dark-eyed beauty naked on a park bench somewhere in Latin America. One by one muscular young men arrive color-coded in blond, black and auburn, no doubt to make them distinguishable. The Monitor fast-forwards like an expert, freezing moments of penetration which he examines with the eye of a connoisseur before continuing, discarding all padding. He is done with Latino porn in less than five minutes and the clerk loads the more serious entertainment of Dragon Warrior VII. The Monitor is immediately absorbed and seems to impress the clerk with his swordplay. The clerk returns to me and I pay for the machine. Outside the FBI is waiting in the car. She says: "That easy?" I nod. There was something akin to real intelligence on the Monitor's face when he was doing battle with the dragon. I think there must be some cultural moral in that, but Jones never appreciates those kinds of thoughts. "What is he watching?"

  "Latino porn and Dragon Warrior VII."

  "D'you think he is someone from humanity's immediate future?"

  "How is it you can say things like that and I can't?"

  "Are we going to have another one of those arguments?"

  "No."

  "How did you explain to the Monitor the reason why you wanted him out of the way?"

  "I let him think I was going to fuck you."

  "Doesn't your Buddhist code stipulate that you're not allowed to tell lies?"

  "There's relative truth."

  "Want to make it absolute?"

  "We've been through that. We're culturally and spiritually incompatible."

  "Meaning my abrasive American personality turns you right off, huh?"

  "You are an excellent agent."

  "How about if I were to soften up? I hear Johnson's baby oil can help in these kinds of situations." She turns away from my paranoid gaze with a smirk on her face. "It's the protocol," she says to the window, "information-sharing. Your Colonel is pretty selective, but then I guess so are we."

  At the end of the waterfront strip we veer off to the left, then to the right. Halfway to Jomtien Beach, we take a left down a private road belonging to an upmarket block of condominiums. It's upmarket for Thailand, anyway. No one has bothered to repave the road since I was last here a few years ago, and we have to sit and wait in the car for the security to come and open the main gate.

  I have timed the journey, taking the likely traffic problem into account, so that we arrive at about noon, when all good Russians are somewhere between sober and drunk. It is 12:12 p.m. when we reach the penthouse apartment on the thirty-seventh floor of the condo building and I press the buzzer. I agonized over whether to call ahead or not and finally decided not to. If Iamskoy is compromised with a half dozen Siberian women without visas, or who have overstayed their visas, or are obviously on the game, he might be that much more willing to talk. A lot will depend on how drunk he is, though. Too drunk and he will pass out, the way he did last time. Too sober and he'll be uptight, too far into himself with his Russian melancholy to communicate at all.

  I think I might be in luck because a woman answers the door. She is about twenty-six, dyed blond hair, Caucasian, thick lips and a wolfish look which she clearly believes to be irresistible. She is wearing a black dress which comes an inch or two below her crotch and reveals a lot of cleavage. Her perfume is not up to my mother's standards, but then I don't think this woman has spent much time in Paris. She looks bl
ank and about to close the door on us when I flash my ID.

  "Andy," she calls without anxiety. Instead of Iamskoy another woman appears in shorts and T-shirt. Then another. A fourth is dressed in a long nightgown done up firmly at the neck. "Is this a bust?" the first woman asks, more with curiosity than concern.

  "I don't know," I answer truthfully. "I want to speak to Andreev."

  Eventually Iamskoy appears from among the small crowd of females. He is tall and gangly and has kept most of his hair, which makes him seem younger than the fifty and some years he has spent in this body. He does a double take, then grins broadly. I think he has absorbed just the right amount of alcohol when he says: "Sonchai! So long it's been! Come in, my good friend, come in."

  I'm checking Jones' face as we enter, thinking she'll be surprised, because apart from the collection of women this is not like the home of a pimp at all. It is very untidy and a major contributor to the untidiness are the books. They are everywhere, on shelves on the walls, on the carpet, stacked up in corners, under the legs of collapsing armchairs.

  Jones is fairly wide-eyed, but mainly because of the women, who seem to be unnerving her with their glares and snippets of harsh-sounding Russian. In my humble opinion Jones is a lot more attractive than any of them, which could explain the glares. I don't think she has seen the books at all, so I point them out. "Andreev is the most obsessive bookworm you'll ever meet. Look at them! French novels, Russian, American, Italian, but that's just light reading. Physics is his subject. He still keeps up with the latest developments, right, Andreev?"

  This is not a diplomatic question on my part. His expression turns to bitterness for a moment, then he recovers and puts a forgiving arm around me.

  "Thais are actually not sensitive at all, they just have this way of covering up through ritual politeness," he explains to Jones. "If you cut away the wais and the other formalities, you find a people who really don't give a damn." His accent is thick, the grammar perfect.