Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  I’m not an expert on the American military, but it occurs to me that this is not the kind of home an average marine would be inclined to show his comrades. The choice of a teak house to live in is eccentric even by Thai standards. They tend to be inhabited by oddball foreigners or Thais of the arty type who have spent a lot of time overseas in places like Paris or New York. When I look more closely, I notice great varnished grain storage baskets of the kind which have become so fashionable, and the futons are all in gold print silk which is only produced by the Khomapastr Corporation, which exports to royalty and billionaires worldwide. Wall brackets hold what seem to be priceless antiques: kendi water jars, reliquary urns with lotus-bud handles, ceramic medicine jars. Everything is Thai, everything is alien. The whole room is begging to be photographed by farangs.

  To reach the next floor it’s necessary to leave the house and return to the external staircase. The entrance to the second floor is locked and I have to go downstairs again to find the old woman. “Mother, I’ve forgotten my key, can I use yours?” She fishes under her shirt and I catch a glimpse of a modern money wallet of the kind favored by backpackers. She draws out a large brass key and hands it to me. Upstairs again I open the lock with the big key, and gratefully enter the cool of the old house.

  15

  The slatted shutters on the windows (there is no glass) allow air to circulate, and the teak walls are good insulators. It’s dark apart from the brilliant outline of the doorway, and I find a light switch, then close the door. The lighting seems to come from nowhere, directed upward from behind a teak panel which runs the length of a corridor I’m standing in.

  On the walls hang six twelve-by-eighteen-inch studies of the same woman’s face; they are the same print in different colors, in exactly the style of famous Warhol portraits of Marilyn Monroe. The woman is definitely half Thai, half Negro, which puts her into a specific category in my feudal society. If she is in her thirties she would have been born in the late sixties or early seventies, when the city was permanently flooded with American servicemen on leave from the war in Vietnam. It is notorious that America sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to the war, and many of their female offspring now work the Bangkok bars. My racist people tend to marginalize them, and their lot can be a tough one. I open a door which gives on to the master bedroom, where homage turns into obsession.

  The woman is everywhere, in oils, watercolors, black-and-white photographic studies, color photos, sometimes full length, sometimes in portrait. There is a huge nude study in oils, opposite the bed, tastefully done, with her pelvis turned slightly to one side; no pubic hair visible, perfect brown breasts with black areolas and nipples, a long fine neck, multicolored hair artfully chaotic and not really African: I think that with the color and frizz washed out it must be straight and black. Somehow the eye travels most naturally not to her face but to a jade ball set in a short gold stick which diagonally pierces her navel in two places.

  I sit on the bed mesmerized by the extraordinary beauty of this woman, her long shapely legs, high buttocks, elegant arms, finely tapered hands turned in the style of a Thai dancer, those alluring oval eyes, almost hollow cheeks, full lips smiling ironically, perhaps a reference to her nakedness, a fine straight nose which must have come from some Caucasian cross in her blood. I put my hands behind my neck and recline full length on the bed, to think about Bradley.

  Suppose a man for whom no other man had ever been a challenge, an accomplished athlete and soldier, himself of pure African blood, heterosexual and surely a connoisseur of the female form as it appears all over the world, a man on the brink of middle age and retirement but more vigorous than a man half his age, stationed in Bangkok and perhaps addicted to the city, as often happens, a frequent visitor to the bars of Nana Plaza, searching as he has searched over decades for that perfect female form?

  Surely this man was no ordinary soldier? This man was born with an instinct for visual beauty as another of his tribe might be born with a genius for jazz. I wonder how it might have happened, that such a man should ever have dreamed of becoming a soldier? Perhaps his exquisite taste developed later in life, when his career path had already been set, maybe in his late twenties? How irksome to find himself permanently surrounded by the ugly functionality of the military world; might one assume a continual dissatisfaction pressing on consciousness, a vow repeated minute to minute, with increasing urgency as the years passed, that after retirement I will . . . A meticulously planned retirement, as befits a career soldier, with the foundations in place long in advance of the due date: the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, in a beautiful house, a serious hobby in precious stones with a web page featuring a jade phallus of great elegance. Should we impute an element of narcissism? How could such a man not love himself to some degree, however stern his professional discipline? Even when he was laid out on a gurney in the morgue with the flabbiness of death and his flesh disfigured by snake bites, did I not witness a stupendous example of manhood?

  Imagine the moment when Bradley first set eyes on this woman. Instant armlock? A stranglehold this warrior could not escape? The kind of woman lesser men might find too dangerous to touch, who had perhaps been waiting herself for someone larger than life? But where had she been hiding? If she had danced in the bars of Nana or Pat Pong, I surely would have heard of her. Such a woman would be famous throughout the city the moment she began gyrating around one of those stainless steel poles.

  I stand up to approach the painting, and admit to an aristocratic note in her pose; she doesn’t look like a woman who would ever dance naked in public. But if she was the bastard child of a black American serviceman, how else would she have earned a living? If her mother was a bar girl her education would have been basic, her technical qualifications zero, her contacts outside of the bar scene very few.

  I try to relate her to the rest of the house, which is not difficult. The two seem to go together, as if selected by a fine eye from different brochures. This isn’t a home, not to me, it is an environment, a barricade against the ugliness of the city, a deliberate and very Western attempt to build a separate, personal reality.

  A very big part of which is erotic. Who could help envisioning their passionate embrace, like two black tigers mating? I imagine elaborate lovemaking of a kind I have never experienced, a whole evening set aside as if for a private banquet, the prolongation of lust, the postponement of climax, the man’s slow relentless savoring of his prize, the woman’s ecstasy underneath her black god. Sure enough, in the bathroom on a shelf I find a pharmacist’s collection of scents, perfumes and aromatic oils, some local but many imported, bearing the name and address of a shop in San Francisco.

  My exhausted body cannot tolerate such stimulation. What of the other side to the marine? I find the computer in a small room which clearly served as an office, a desktop tower with a big nineteen-inch monitor. The office is stark, free of mementos of the woman: bare teak walls and floor, a shelf with a modest collection of books including some very large ones which look like photographic collections, and a single art object in a place of honor alone on a high shelf: a jade horse and rider. I assume an imitation. Who keeps real jade in a wooden house, even a wooden house like this?

  I press the power button on the computer tower and the monitor creaks and flickers its way into Windows Millennium Edition. I click on “programs” and find a long list, perhaps as many as thirty or forty different applications. In addition to the word processors in both English and Thai, there are astrology and astronomy, gemology, a tutorial on mathematics, use of English, a Thai translation program, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s New World Dictionary, How to Write a Winning Business Plan—it’s like a self-improvement regime for someone who intended to leap from ignorance to erudition with no gap in between.

  It is 12:46 p.m. and my problem has progressed from no data to too much. Proper examination of the computer and Bradley’s web surfing will take days. I call up Word for Windows, type �
�Welcome, Khun Rosen and Khun Nape,” switch the screen off but leave the computer running.

  I return to Kaoshan Road, to have a copy made of the key to the upstairs rooms, buy a cardboard camera with flash and return to take pictures of the portraits of the woman, the jade horseman and the computer. I lock the door, return the original key to the old lady, who squats on the teak floor downstairs, near a window convenient for spitting. She is chewing her betel. She seems to have forgotten about me, for she gives a start when I approach, then replaces the key in her money bag without looking at me. Outside in the street I find a motorcycle taxi.

  16

  At Dao Phrya Bridge the Mercedes was gone, no doubt taken away by police. I paused for a moment to examine something which must have been under the car. The corpses of two cobras, which had been beaten to death, not shot.

  Even as I got off the bike to pay the fare, I had heard a noise from the squatter huts which was only half human. Striding across the wasteland, I became aware of a man’s full-throated roar originating from deep in his chest, like the bellowing of an enraged bull. “Fuck you, fuck the FBI, fuck the FBI’s mother, I AM THIRSTY.”

  The headman came to meet me with a worried look as I reached the edge of the settlement. “You’re late. You said noon, it’s one-thirty.”

  “I had a busy morning. What’s going on?” They had tied Old Tou upright to a plank with rope which encircled his arms, trunk and legs in a continuous binding of bright orange. Only the old man’s neck and head were free. They had leaned him against one of the sturdier huts. The cords on his neck stood out when he roared.

  “You said you wanted him sober. This was the only way.”

  “Can’t you give him water?”

  “We’ve given him gallons. He’s not thirsty for water.”

  “Untie him.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not untying him till we’ve got him drunk again. If he goes on the rampage he’ll destroy the whole settlement. D’you want to interrogate him or not?”

  The old man glared at me with bloodshot eyes. “Are you the police bastard they keep telling me about? I’m going to tear your nose off with my teeth.”

  “I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “Fuck your questions. I want whisky. Rice whisky.”

  I nodded to the headman, who brought a plastic bottle filled to the brim with transparent fluid. “Give him a little, not too much.”

  The headman poured a couple of inches into a plastic cup. The old man held his head up like a bird while the headman poured the alcohol down his throat. “More.”

  “Just answer some questions, and you can go on killing yourself as fast as you like.”

  The old man licked his lips. “When they let me go I’m going to kill you. What fucking questions?”

  “Yesterday, you saw the Mercedes arrive with the black farang?”

  He spat. “Of course I saw, I was sitting against the wall of the bridge having a drink. I saw everything.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw Khmer Rouge.”

  Guffaws from the audience. I sighed. “You were in the Cambodian civil war?”

  “Idiot, I wasn’t in any fucking war. A couple of weeks ago someone brought a DVD here about some stupid American journalist in Cambodia who got his friend into trouble—a boring fucking film but I liked the bit where he slits the side of a buffalo with a razor and drinks the blood. I never would have thought of that, those Cambodians are rough trade.”

  “So what about Khmer Rouge?”

  “In the film the Khmer Rouge all wear red checkered scarves around their stupid heads, that’s what they were wearing yesterday.”

  “He’s right about the film,” the headman said. “We all watched it. I remember the scarves too.”

  “Who was wearing the scarves?”

  “The motorcycle yobs. There were about six of them, nasty pieces of work as far as I could see.”

  “They arrived after the Mercedes, or before?”

  “About the same time. They surrounded it.”

  “You see any of them open the door?”

  Old Tou laughed. “No, they did the same as you and your partner. They got off the bikes, went to the car and kind of ogled and grunted, then they started jabbering. I don’t think they were as tough as they made out. Then they all got together for some kind of powwow, and ran back to their bikes and left.”

  “Were they speaking Thai or Khmer?”

  “Too far away to tell. Anyway, how the fuck would I know if they were speaking fucking Khmer or Chiu Chow Chinese?”

  “Was any of them female?”

  “Give me another drink, asshole.” I motioned to the headman, who poured some more whisky down Old Tou’s throat. “Female? No, these were swaggering boys, you know the type, probably on yaa baa or ganja, no true manhood, they couldn’t stomach the scene in the car. After they’d gone I went over to see what all the fuss was about. That black farang was being eaten alive by that python. There were cobras, too.”

  “What did you do?”

  Old Tou licked his lips. “Well, I couldn’t be sure, you know.” The way he said it made some of the audience crack up. Several squatted in order to laugh harder.

  “Couldn’t be sure? How’s that?” More laughter.

  “I get visions.” Hilarity now from the audience. Two men and a woman lay down in order to enjoy a really good laugh. Some people leaned against a hut, overcome by giggles.

  The headman grinned broadly. “He hallucinates a lot of the time. He sees snakes, mostly.”

  “That’s right. That’s why I couldn’t be sure. When they told me I’d seen real snakes I had to have a drink.”

  “There was no woman in the car?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. If there’d been anyone else in the car they’d be as dead as that black man.”

  “You didn’t see a woman at all, tall, half Negro, half Thai, maybe leaving the car before the motorcycles arrived?”

  “No. A woman I would have remembered. I never hallucinate women. Why should I, I haven’t had an erection in thirty years.” Guffaws, people shaking their heads, the headman turning away to laugh.

  “Okay.” I turned to the audience. “Anyone else see the motorcycles?”

  People directed their gaze at the headman. “The motorcycles were real, he didn’t hallucinate them, but nobody wants to give evidence. They think this was a gang killing, they don’t want to get involved.”

  “Generally, do people anonymously agree with what he just said, strictly on a nonattributable basis?”

  “Nonattributable sounds good, whatever it means. Anonymously? Yes, quite a few saw the bikes, and Old Tou walk to the car and look in the window and then he started banging his head against the car. We all watched that. A group of people walked over to the car. You saw them when you and your partner arrived.”

  The headman poured more whisky down Old Tou’s throat. The man’s capacity was amazing. He drained the plastic bottle of moonshine before the headman judged him drunk enough to be untied. As a precaution, though, they placed another bottle nearby and stood away after the ropes were loosened. The old man made straight for the bottle and upturned it into his mouth.

  I thanked the headman.

  “So you won’t be sending the FBI to investigate us? Moonshine is our main source of income, we’d be destitute without it.”

  This was the first sign of weakness and I needed to exploit it. It took only an exchange of glances and a jerk of the chin on his part for me to follow him back to his hut, where the whisky was distilling, trickling slowly out of its cloth filter into an urn. The headman took a bottle from a corner and found a couple of plastic cups. We wished each other good luck, then the raw alcohol hit the back of my throat and wormed its way into my stomach. It was cozy in the hut, with the fumes from the mash cooking over the charcoal embers.

  “You’re from District 8, aren’t you?”

  I gazed steadily at him. “So?”

  A sh
rug. “Your Colonel is famous. Vikorn, isn’t it?”

  “You know him?”

  A cautious pursing of the lips. “No, not personally. Like I say, he’s very famous.”

  “Do you want to talk to him directly?”

  A disarming smile. “I wasn’t insinuating anything. Look, we don’t want this FBI, whatever it is, coming round asking questions. The people really don’t know anything. They were either drunk or playing cards. Old Tou hardly has a brain cell left in his head.”

  “Maybe you saw something?”

  A hesitation. “Well, I did happen to be near the top of the slip road when the Mercedes arrived.”

  “When I asked you before, you said you weren’t here.”

  A shrug. “I was returning from business on the other side of town.”

  “And?”

  “It was more or less as Old Tou described, except that the Mercedes stopped at the top of the slip road, then some bikers arrived. Someone got out of the car and onto one of the bikes, but it was on the far side of the car so I couldn’t see so well. One of the bikes rode off with this passenger.”

  Only more moonshine would develop his story. I’d had less than one-third of a cup, but already the fumes were filling my head. He poured two more cups, knocked some back like a professional and smacked his lips. I tried to maintain concentration while I gazed at him through a blur. “What else?”

  A wry grin. “You’re good, aren’t you?” He finished the cup. “The bikers had guns. They looked like those little automatic machine guns you see in movies. They were pointing them at the car. It looked as though that black farang was being hijacked.” He engaged my eyes. “Naturally . . .”