by John Burdett
“Naturally you turned away. The last thing you needed was to be a witness to a crime and have to give evidence.”
The headman detected no note of irony. He beamed with obvious relief. “Thanks for your understanding.”
I finished the whisky and stood up. “I don’t think the FBI cares about your moonshine. They might come. If they do, set Old Tou onto them. Don’t worry.”
“D’you want money?” the headman asked. “I can give you a little from the sales last week. The people will understand.”
I shook my head. “Good luck to you, brother.”
The headman gave his most convincing smile. “Thank you, brother. May you avenge your partner and live in peace.”
I acknowledged with a nod.
I had told my motorcycle chauffeur to wait, and I could see him loitering by his motorbike near the bridge. I could not put it off any longer. It was time to face the Colonel.
17
A Third World police station, which is to say a two-story reinforced concrete structure festooned with our flag and busts of our deeply beloved King, with a large reception area occupying most of the ground floor, open for the length of the building as if one wall had been left out. In this open area there are many rows of heavy-duty plastic chairs joined by beams under the seats; the business a citizen may have here is infinite.
You have to remember we’re Buddhist. Compassion is an obligation, even if corruption is inevitable. The poor come for money and food, the illiterate come for help with filling in forms, those without connections come for character references and help in getting jobs, tourists come with their problems, children come because they are lost, women come because they are tired of being beaten by their husbands, husbands come because their wives have deserted with the family savings. Prostitutes come with problems with their mamasans, feuding families come with complaints and threats. It is not unusual for an avenging brother or father to tell the police of his blood vow to kill the bastard who caused offense to wife or sister, perhaps seeking some indication that in the circumstances the police will turn a blind eye to the proposed assassination, for a fee of course. Sometimes young people come to try to find out who they are, for we are often a polygamous society in which babies are sometimes given to close relatives or friends for life and it is not always clear who belongs to whom. Drunks and beggars come to sit in the chairs, a monk in saffron robes waits his turn for help and advice.
Now here is the local leper who begs by holding a brass bowl between his stumps and who for ten baht will contort his face into something really pathetic. If the prospects are better he will let out a heartrending wail and bang his head on the floor until one of the cops threatens to shoot him. And there’s the tattooist who plies his trade on the street corner with two very long needles and a limited palette (anything so long as it’s black). When it rains the duty officer sometimes allows him to bring his victims here into the reception area, where he tortures them in one of the chairs. He is important, this tattooist who is half body artist, half shaman. Boxers and high-rise construction workers are in particular need of the protection afforded by the full astrological chart on back and solar plexus.
My junior colleagues who man the desks have developed a posture of stern kindliness, a willingness to help tempered by long exposure to the ruses of the poor, for District 8 is the very essence of Krung Thep, its heart and its armpit. I can hardly believe that my brother Pichai will no longer be here to share it with me, for this is where we both came of age, where Pichai built on his noble disgust and where I first fell in love with the polluted beauty of human life. It is here, too, that I learned to forgive my mother and to honor her, for against the backdrop of District 8 Nong’s life has been a brilliant success and a shining example. If only every woman could be like her.
My colleagues look away when I enter the station. Every man has ordained as a monk for at least three months of his life, meaning that every man has seriously contemplated the inevitability of his own death, the corruption of the body, the worms, the disintegration, the meaninglessness of everything except the Way of the Buddha. We do not look on death the way you do, farang. My closest colleagues grasp my arm and one or two embrace me. No one says sorry. Would you be sorry about a sunset? No one doubts that I have sworn to avenge Pichai’s death. There are limits to Buddhism when honor is at stake.
“Detective Jitpleecheep, the Colonel wants to see you.” The diminutive woman in short-sleeved blue shirt, black belt and blue skirt is a junior police officer who acts as the Colonel’s secretary and aide-de-camp. She is also his eyes and ears in the station, his antennae, for there is no such thing as a nonpolitical appointment in our kingdom. I nod, climb some stairs, walk through a wooden door into a bare passage at the end of which I knock on another wooden door no more impressive than the first, except that the architecture of the building suggests that this office will be larger than the rest, with a better view.
At the far end of the room, across a floor of bare boards, a man in his early sixties is waiting. He is wearing the working uniform of a colonel of police, who is also superintendent of this district. His peaked cap hangs from a nail in the wall to his left, a gold-framed picture of the King hangs on his right. His wooden desk is bare except for an old-fashioned blotter, a plastic receptacle for ballpoint pens, and a picture of him standing with some elderly monks, one of whom is a famous abbot of a local monastery. The occasion was the police execution without trial of fifteen yaa baa smugglers, which required the subsequent blessing of the abbot to square it with local opinion, which had been irresponsibly inflamed by bleeding-heart journalists (who had blatantly insinuated that the dead smugglers had belonged to a notorious army syndicate in competition with Vikorn’s notorious police syndicate). With a little help from the abbot our robust citizens saw immediately that such defamation, even if justified, did not detract from the justice of the Colonel’s prompt dispatch of the villains, thus saving a small fortune in trial and prison costs. Not long afterward, the Colonel financed a new dormitory wing to the abbot’s monastery, complete with electricity and running water, where novice monks might meditate in peace and tranquillity.
The Colonel owns the military bearing, strong jaw and frank unblinking eyes of a truly accomplished crook. Nobody knows the extent of his wealth; he probably has no idea himself. Apart from the million-dollar yacht he confiscated from a Dutch smuggler and subsequently bought for ten thousand baht at an auction at which he was the sole bidder (because no one else was invited), there are large tracts of land in the northeast along the edge of the Mekong, a hundred bungalows on Ko Samui which he lets to tourists, a country mansion near Chiang Mai in the northwest. In Krung Thep he lives in modest accommodation as befits a humble cop, with wife number one and the youngest of their five children. Why do I love this man?
For reasons unfathomable to me, the Colonel has hung on the wall behind his desk a map of Thailand issued by the Crime Suppression Division, which shows the geographical areas in which police conniving in organized crime is supposed to be at its worst. Arrows of different colors point almost everywhere. Along the Lao and Cambodian borders the police help smuggle drugs and endangered species destined for China; along the Burmese border we help bring in enough methamphetamines weekly to keep the entire population awake for a month. All along the coast the police work hand in hand with Customs and Excise to assist the clandestine oil trade, for which most of the country’s fishing fleet has adapted its boats: they sail out to offshore tankers most nights, receiving the contraband diesel into their specially designed stainless steel tanks; more than 12 percent of Thailand’s diesel oil is contraband. All around the edges of Krung Thep and in hundreds of rural locations the police protect illegal gambling dens, mostly from other police and the army, which is always trying to muscle in. At street level the police commercial genius produces some of the best cooked-food stalls in the city, owned and run by young constables who are immune to prosecution for illegal hawking. The map is a
mind-boggling maze of red, green, yellow and orange arrows designating the different infractions indigenous to each area, with Day-Glo cross-hatching, dire warnings in boxes, pessimistic footnotes and stark headers. I am not the first to observe that the Colonel is the only person in the room not to have it in his field of vision.
I have gazed at this map many times. Taking into account that the police are generally facilitating someone else’s scam, it begins to look as if 61 million people are engaged in a successful criminal enterprise of one sort or another. No wonder my people smile a lot.
My Colonel, a born leader, stands up while I approach his desk. I place my palms together near my forehead and wai courteously. The Colonel comes around his desk to embrace me. A firm, manly, warmhearted hug which starts tears in my eyes.
“Are you going to kill me, Sonchai?” He gestures to the chair by the desk.
I sit as the Colonel does so. “Should I?”
The Colonel shrugs. “It all depends on whether I set you up or not, doesn’t it? If I did, then by all means, shoot me. I would in your place.”
“Did you set us up?”
The Colonel rubs his chin. “I feel guilty of negligence—but that is my only crime.” I nod. It is somewhat the answer I had expected. “Sonchai, I’ve been waiting for you all morning and I haven’t eaten. We are going to eat at my bar.” He lifts the receiver of an old-style telephone/intercom, presses a button and speaks. “We’re going across town to Pat Pong—call the bar and tell them to keep it closed. If they’ve opened already tell them to clear it. And I want an escort, I don’t want to spend the rest of the day in traffic.” He replaces the receiver. “Shall we?”
18
The Colonel’s car today is an old white Datsun, but it could have been the royal limo for the way it beats the traffic. It helps having a two-man motorcycle escort with sirens screaming. We approach Pat Pong from the Sarawong side, and the driver stops outside the Princess Club, which stands in a side soi off the main street of Pat Pong. The Colonel knows that my mother worked this street and I wonder if he is making some kind of point. As we pause to enter the bar, I see myself as I must have been more than twenty years ago: a skinny boy bewildered and intrigued by the business of flesh.
The mamasan and half a dozen girls in jeans and T-shirts wai to the Colonel as we enter. They have set up a table in the seating area, with a tablecloth, forks, spoons. They immediately begin bringing an array of dishes from the restaurants and food stalls round about.
“D’you want to start with beer or shall we go straight into the whisky? Let’s have a beer, we sell Kloster for the tourists, which I have to admit gives a cleaner taste. It goes so well with chili too.”
I’ve eaten at the Colonel’s banquets before, it is one of the old man’s favorite ways of cementing the esprit de corps (trips on his boat are another), but never as the sole guest. I find it a little eerie to be served by girls who will be selling their bodies in a few hours’ time, as if they were a team of virginal housemaids. They go out of their way to please the Colonel, waiing and giving him their best innocent smiles. I know it is my duty to get drunk in pace with the Colonel, but I’m not sure how my body will react to alcohol after the ravages of the yaa baa the night before and more than twenty-four hours without sleep, not to mention those two cups of moonshine which sat in my stomach like burning coals. I sip at my Kloster, which I drink straight from the bottle, as does the Colonel. I watch him dip into a small wicker basket and bring out a portion of sticky rice which he makes into a compact ball and dips into a papaya salad, nodding to me to follow suit. Perhaps you have tormented your stomach with papaya pok-pok, farang, on one of your visits to my country? It is made with twelve chilies, ground up with the sauce so you cannot escape them. Even my Colonel is sniffing after the first mouthful. I let the pepper inflame my mouth slowly, before it trickles like fresh lava down to my empty stomach. I sip some more beer and immediately experience the delicious clash of the ice-cold beer with the fire of the chili. The Colonel is watching me closely. It is my duty to demonstrate heartiness.
I sample some tom-yum soup, which is almost as spicy as the salad, then start on the braised chicken with oyster sauce, which is more a Chinese dish than a Thai one, but popular with the Colonel. The fish is sea bass simply but expertly fried, with an excellent sauce of chili and fish paste, and the raw minced toad has been well prepared with spring onions and, of course, more chili. Deep in my empty, yaa baa–flayed stomach it is as if the chili were oozing over a wound, setting it alight. I quickly down the rest of my beer and one of the girls immediately brings another. I ask for water, too, raising a grin on the Colonel’s face. Now a girl brings a large tureen of fat snails, cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. The Colonel wipes up some of the sauce with a ball of sticky rice, then starts sucking loudly on the end of the snail until the body pops out into his mouth. I follow suit, trying not to gag.
My master finishes his beer, calls for another and opens the bottle of Mekong whisky the girls have left on the table. He pours two beakers and adds ice from a bucket. “So, Sonchai, why don’t you tell me your views on the case so far?” This is not an innocent question.
“I’ve only had a day.” I suck on a snail for punctuation. “Nothing significant yet. By the way, why did you order us to follow the black farang?”
He tuts disapprovingly and shakes his head. “Why must you always come straight to the point? Is it your farang blood? No wonder you’re so unpopular.”
“I’m unpopular because I don’t take money.”
“That too. Neither you nor your late partner made one contribution to the common pot in ten years. You were like monks on a permanent alms trek.”
“Why did you put up with us?”
“My brother asked me to.”
“I think you want to make merit. We might be the only good thing you ever did.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. Because of my brother I shielded you from a prosecution for homicide. What’s so good about that?”
What can I say? I look into the tom-yum and its bright crimson fragments of chili. “You won’t tell me why we were following Bradley?”
“Do you think perhaps the FBI asked me to have him followed?”
I shake my head. “The FBI didn’t know anything until yesterday. They didn’t even know where he was living.”
“You’re talking about the FBI at the embassy. I’m talking about the FBI in Washington.”
“You talk to them?”
“Of course not. They talk to someone who talks to me.”
“Really?”
“Because the CIA talk to the FBI. At least, from time to time. And guess who the CIA talk to?” I shrug. “The same people we talk to, on the ground in Laos, Burma, Cambodia. The CIA pays in cash, we pay in immunity from prosecution for Customs and Excise violations. In the end, we get the same information.” He prods the sticky rice. “Something to do with jade.” He adds this tentatively, to try me out.
“Don’t believe it. Why would jade traders use snakes to kill the competition? Anyway, how could a black farang get into the jade trade in a serious way? It’s dominated by Chiu Chow Chinese. They trade in a secret sign language. And why would the FBI care?”
He frowns. “Okay, so it wasn’t jade.”
“Yaa baa?”
“Why yaa baa? Why not heroin?”
I force-swallow a ball of rice to soak up the fire. “Because the DEA is all over the opium trade. Heroin is for desperadoes. Yaa baa is safer and the market is growing all the time.”
He opens his hands. “So, you’ve solved the case. It was yaa baa for sure.”
“You’ve told me nothing.”
“It’s my job to tell you things? You’re the detective, I’m just the guy in the office.”
“Colonel, sir, my partner died yesterday. I want to know why we were following the black farang.” A moment of truth as our eyes lock. No one doubts the Colonel has strong ties to the yaa baa trade.
; He toys with the idea of staring me out, which he knows well how to do, but decides on a posture of meekness and looks away. “I’m sorry, Sonchai, I’m really really sorry. The truth is I don’t know why you were following Bradley. I just passed the order on down the line. Was it the FBI? Was it our Crime Suppression Division? Was it someone else? Who knows?”
“You’re the chief of District 8. No one gives you orders without explanation.”
“I was told his visa had expired.” I want to laugh, but the Colonel has assumed a somber expression bordering on the pompous. “It’s a grave offense for a member of a foreign armed force to overstay. It’s not like a civilian.”
“You’re serious?”
He nods. “That was the official reason. I’ll show you the file if you like.” He leans forward. “I’m not like you, Sonchai, I don’t ask indiscreet questions. That is why I’m a colonel and you will never be more than a detective.”
“So whoever gave you the order was important enough for you to need to be discreet?” He shakes his head. Clearly I’m a hopeless case. Then suddenly he switches it on, the amazing charm and candor, that two-thousand-volt charisma which I can never resist. His humility and compassion are totally convincing. “I promise you, Sonchai, I had no idea Bradley was going to die yesterday. And I won’t stand in your way, no matter where the investigation leads.” To my question-mark gaze he adds: “I promised my brother I would take care of the two of you. Losing one is bad enough. My brother is an arhat. One keeps one’s promise to such a man, especially when he is a blood relation. You have my word. Anyway, whatever Bradley was up to, it had nothing to do with me.”
An awkward moment, before we resume eating and drinking. I say casually: “I found out Bradley’s address through the Internet. I went to his house.”
The Colonel raises his eyes. “You did? Find anything?”