by John Burdett
“We’re not investigating him, sir . . . That’s correct, we did e-mail that picture, which was taken from the scene of a murder attempt on the local detective who is investigating . . . I know the Bradley case looks like a narcotics vendetta but . . . The piece was stolen from Bradley’s home, sir . . . Mr. Warren exchanged a number of e-mails with Bradley . . . No, there’s not necessarily any connection . . . No, I don’t want another screwup . . . That’s right, I agree, neither I nor the Bureau need the heat . . . Well, I don’t know that I can do that, we don’t have any investigative powers here . . . Leave it to the local police? That’s exactly what I am doing, sir . . . Goodbye sir.” He folds the telephone and his eyes are glittering when he looks at me. “Quantico has no comment on the picture. They say it didn’t come out clearly enough on the e-mail.”
Cynicism has distorted Nape’s face, but I’m most sorry for Kimberley Jones, who looks ashamed and cannot meet my gaze. She says to Rosen in a quiet voice: “This man nearly died.”
“But I’m not American,” I say with a cute twist of my lips.
A long pause. Rosen says: “Looks like you’re on your own. Kimberley here will accompany you whenever you feel you need her. She’ll . . . she’ll help with anything that doesn’t lead to Warren.” He shrugs.
“Can I at least have a picture of Warren?”
Three furrowed brows. Kimberley Jones says cautiously: “Sure, we can get you one of those. There’s probably a thousand in the public domain. He’s been photographed at the White House scores of times. Right?”
“Yeah, right,” Rosen agrees. “But don’t make it obvious it came from us.”
“I’ll use a brown paper envelope,” Jones says with heavy sarcasm. A Do I need this? look from Rosen.
26
Nong sits and watches while the nurse changes my dressing. She holds herself together while the nurse is in the room, then bursts into tears. Drying her eyes: “The person who did this to you will not make a good death.”
I’ll have to explain that, won’t I? Look at it this way: you’re facing old age, your sins have been mounting steadily, but you cannot for the life of you see how you could have reacted differently, given the pathetic cards Fate handed you at birth, and now you have to consider the inevitable karmic bill: You think this lifetime has been tough? See that legless guy on his atrocious trolley begging on the sidewalk? Last time around he wasn’t nearly as bad as you’ve been, why, he was a saint compared to you.
With us the lifting of the egoic veil at the moment of death reveals the workings of karma in all its pitiless majesty: see that clubfoot in your next life, that’s from when you fouled your best friend on the football pitch; see those buckteeth the size of gravestones, that’s your cynical sense of humor; see that early death from leukemia, that’s your greed.
To make a good death is to proceed gracefully into a better body and a better life. The consequences of a bad death are hard to look at. You will not make a good death is a power curse; it makes Fuck you sound like a benediction.
Nong stays with me while they carefully help me into a wheelchair and push me down the corridor to the lift, which takes us down to the garden. This is my first outing and I insist on sitting near the deliciously swishing irrigation system. I like the intermittent spray on my face, the return to infancy in more luxurious surroundings than I ever knew. Is it just me or are we all hardwired to expect our first years to be spent surrounded by flowers in a magic garden? I’m surprised that my mother seems to read my thoughts, holds my hand and smiles. Over the wall the harsh city claws away like an animal. I experience the invalid’s repugnance toward return: two more days and they will let me out. I suppose it would be unmanly to ask to stay a little longer?
A hospital orderly brings some of the art books and sets them on a table near my chair, then a few minutes later Rosen comes with a complex expression on his face where shame does battle with career-path paranoia. On the one hand, he gives me the photographs himself in broad daylight in front of my mother; on the other, they are in a brown paper envelope on which no eagle or other identification appears. He departs rather abruptly, too. After a while Nong takes her leave with some unconvincing excuse. She is bored and a little repulsed by the anodyne atmosphere. She belongs on the other side of the wall, in the lusty, clawing city.
Now that I’ve had a chance to examine the pix (as the FBI call them), I wonder if Rosen is making a point: Warren with the first Bush, Warren with Clinton (twice), Warren with the second Bush, looking older and sleeker. I was not expecting a jeweler to be a man of steel, but that’s how he comes across, as if it was sheer willpower that got him into the Rose Garden every time. Clinton was tall, and Warren is the same height, but leaner. Gray-blue eyes, thinning light brown hair turning elegantly gray. He looks so much more sophisticated than the President, with his even tan, filigree gold chain on his left wrist, the posture of a man who has no need to insist. You can almost smell the cologne. He will outlast this President, his smile says; every time. I put him down on top of one of the art books, feeling my strength start to fade. I doze off for a couple of minutes and wake to find him still there, staring at me. I pick him up again. Perhaps it is the power of the White House that triggers an old appetite for the art of detection. Often when we are sick the mind is temporarily released from its prison in the body and floats freely. During this afternoon I sense my own begin to dock again with its destiny.
“What’s the matter?” Kimberley Jones asks me when she comes up behind my chair and catches me staring at Warren for the thousandth time. “You were frowning as if you know him.”
How to explain? I dare not mention the dark figure that, spiritually speaking, I see standing behind him in each of those pix and whom I seem to recognize.
27
In Kat’s modest home the scent is mostly sandalwood, from her joss sticks. Like me, she lives in one room which our national optimism leads us to call an apartment, although hers is inches bigger. Her picture of our beloved King hangs in exactly the same position as mine, and her Buddha shrine sits on a high shelf near the door. I watch her bow to the Buddha three times with the incense held in a bunch between her hands. She concentrates mindfully, no doubt praying for luck. She is wearing a baggy housecoat and, I suspect, nothing else.
“I’m going to have to practice, Sonchai, I missed five balloons last night. You don’t mind? It’ll be like old times. Did you ever tell your mother how you helped me? I didn’t, I was afraid she might be angry with me for corrupting your young mind.” She walks to a slim cupboard in the opposite corner and takes out a plastic lunch box.
“I told her a few years ago. She thought it was funny. She wanted to know if it ever got any further than helping with your act. It didn’t, did it?”
“Sonchai, you were ten years old and I’m not that kind of woman.”
“My mother said no wonder I had a wild adolescence, when my first experience of a woman’s private part was darts shooting out of it.”
“Not totally misleading, if you listen to the way some men talk about women. D’you hate women?”
“No. But you hate men.”
“Let’s not go into that. I hate men in the abstract. You I like. You helped me perfect my act.” She has taken an aluminum tube out of the lunch box together with a pack of condoms. She hands me the condoms while she lies on a futon on the floor. While she is fitting the tube, I cross the room and blow up the condom until it is about a foot long, then I tie the end and hold it out. Kat has prudishly arranged her dress so that she can shoot the darts without flashing me, like an archer from a fortress. I hold the condom as far from my face as I can while she fits a dart into the tube. Suddenly, without any sign of movement from Kat, the cock-shaped balloon bursts and a dart sticks in the plaster. There are pinpricks and chips all over the plaster.
“I never understood why you couldn’t use a dartboard.”
“The customers always move the balloons a little bit. I think I make them nervous. I ne
ed to know how to hit something wobbly.” She giggles. “Anyway, there’s a certain satisfaction in killing cocks.”
“Was it Bradley made you hate men?”
“Shit.” The dart had missed and now it was stuck in the wooden door, really some distance away. I had noticed a slight movement in her lower abdomen this time, in the region of her ovaries. “My first and only husband made me hate men. I’m the jealous, possessive type and he was a motorcycle taxi driver. All over the city, especially to the bars and massage parlors. I don’t think there was a whore he didn’t screw. I was seventeen years old, for god’s sake. Thai men claim to like women, but they only like fucking. Not even that, they love anything forbidden, new, unused. They’re terrible for underage girls, far worse than any farang. He was like that. I’m a one-heart woman. I give it once, then I don’t have it anymore. So I decided I would never have another man. I learned to shoot darts from my pussy instead. I shoot down a whole army of inflated dicks just for practice. Of course, there’s always another army waiting to be shot down.”
“But you did know Bradley?”
“Yes, I didn’t want to talk about it in Nana. Yes, I knew him. An American marine. It’s a little painful to talk about. He persuaded me to give men a second chance, after all that time. Five years ago he was a regular visitor to Nana. You know, one of those foreigners who come and can’t believe their eyes, get addicted for a few months, then the charm starts to wear off. He was quite a character, though. A man like that, magnificent and very black—who could forget him? He told me he was different. I’m a sucker, aren’t I? I’m surprised you didn’t find anyone else who recognized his photograph.”
“How many women stay five years in the bars? Tell me how he was different.”
“He was respectful. He didn’t have that mixture of lust, fear and contempt. He really seemed to like us women, as if we were people he could be friends with. He was very popular in all the bars.”
“He picked you up? He paid your bar fine?”
Bang. A good shot! I saw the dart pierce the center of the condom and impale it against the wall, from which it now hangs shriveled and flaccid, all passion dead.
“Certainly not. I told you, I don’t go with men, not even to sell my body. This was different. I do private parties, that’s how I really make my money, the floor show is just my shopwindow. I use an agent, and the agent tells the clients: ‘Look, don’t touch. This lady is not for sale. She does her act, she’ll socialize, maybe even sit on your lap if you really want, but that’s it.’ Usually the agent is very strong about that, really makes sure the client has understood. Anyway, it happened five years ago that the agent called me to say he had a party for me, and the money was double what I usually charge. He didn’t say why it was double, so I was suspicious. I said: ‘Farangs?’ and he said: ‘No.’ I said: ‘You told them no sex?’ And he said: ‘Yes, yes, all understood, no sex.’ ”
I’ve got into the swing of it now. The inflated condom was already in my hand, at arm’s length. Kat paused and sat up slightly. “It was in the Dusit Thani Hotel. The suite on the third floor is for hire for private functions. Very expensive, I would imagine. That’s where the party was. They even rigged up a revolving stage for me. This was soon after the first time they showed me on farang TV, and I think this party wanted the live version, exactly as they’d shown it on the documentary—it was the BBC, I think. So I do my act without paying too much attention to the clients. I have to concentrate on the balloons, after all. But how could I help but notice that a giant black man is there, with a lot of peasants?”
She uttered the word with contempt. “Not even peasants, hill people. Tribesmen down from the mountains, getting filthy drunk and out of hand. When one tried to come up to the stage to touch me, I started looking for the way out. One of the tribesmen had a familiar face, as if I’d seen him somewhere, but I didn’t know where, maybe the newspapers, I think he was one of those drug lords from the borderlands. He was the leader, he had this way of barking, and when he barked the others stopped whatever they were doing and listened. It was exactly like a movie, with some chief thug trying to control the other thugs. Two of them got so drunk, though, they were out of control, and their leader didn’t seem to care too much—they were talking about, you know, having me onstage together while the thing was going round. In all my years in this game, I’d never allowed myself to get into such a situation, and I thought: Oh no, here we go. Mentally, I prepared myself for gang rape—it’s a professional hazard and I thought it had to happen sooner or later.”
Another condom, another bang. “When they took out their guns and started comparing, I knew I was in for a brutal night. Then the black man stands up, comes to the stage, takes off his shirt—it was one of those tropical things, with pineapples and mangoes all over, and obviously it’s enormous. He puts it around my shoulders and it comes down to my ankles.” She laughed. “Then he says to the boys: ‘She’s mine, fellas, okay?’ ”
She reached in the lunch box for more darts. “And these Stone Age creeps just looked at him. No one was going to mess with this black giant. He takes me into the dressing room and says, really gently: ‘Better get out of here—how about a date tomorrow?’ ” She laughed again. “I’m not the swooning type, but I was thirty-six and wondering if I hadn’t been a little hard on the opposite sex for the past twenty years. He had saved me from a nightmare, and he was just—well, frankly, irresistible.”
The practice was over apparently. She stood up to pack away the darts, the condoms and the aluminum tube.
“How was it?”
“How was it? Strange was how it was. I thought he was a real gentleman, he took me to dinner, treated me like a lady. He didn’t seem in any hurry to go to bed with me. It was as though he wanted to find out something—I think maybe he was still trying to find out about Thai women—what makes us tick. We didn’t go to bed together until the third date.” She pursed her lips.
“Would you mind telling me about that?”
“About the sex? Is that a part of your investigation? I think he was disappointed. Like most men, he assumed I was something very special between the sheets, you know, as if I was going to have two vaginas or something? I kept hinting, explaining: Look, I developed the act exactly because I’m shy and not very good in bed—I don’t know how to please a man at all—I don’t know what men want.”
“But for you, how was it?”
“Not like anything I’ve known before, but I’m not an expert. The girls say most men just want to get it in, have their little spurt, then get it out again. Well, he certainly wasn’t like that.”
“Could you try to be a little more specific?”
Kat gives me a dirty look. “This turning you on, Sonchai? Want to know what it’s like for a woman to be underneath a man like that? Actually, I think he must have been used to being adored. He lay there and seemed to expect me to do all the work. I think he was used to women drooling and lusting after him. Or maybe it’s the way Americans have sex, I don’t know.”
“How big was his penis?”
She put a hand over her mouth. “Sonchai! It was normal size, I mean, if it was in proportion to him he would have torn me in two. Normal size, Sonchai, bigger than Thai men, same as a farang.”
“But you did make love?”
“Of course. But only once, and I didn’t enjoy it because I was dealing with this feeling that I’d disappointed him, that he was looking for some kind of extra-exotic, freaky sex—I felt inadequate, I suppose.” She sighed. “Afterwards, just to please him, I asked if he wanted me to shoot darts.” She laughed. “I must have suspected that’s what he wanted, or I wouldn’t have brought my darts, would I? A woman like me, you never know exactly what men expect. I got the feeling he wanted me to perform for him, to be his sex toy, but he never asked me to do anything. He wanted me to know what to do. He was being like a woman, in a way. Shooting darts is the only thing I do that interests men.”
“Did you perform for hi
m? Did he say yes?”
She nods sadly. “Yes. He came alive then. It turned out that he’d planned it. He’d even bought a dartboard and he positioned me on the bed—and he made a video, with close-ups and everything. He’d planned everything beforehand, but he hadn’t wanted to ask me. I don’t know if he was a gentleman or some kind of strange romantic. Everything had to be perfect, though, the lighting, the position of the camera—everything. That’s when he got most excited, but we didn’t make love again.” A pause. “What I remember most was the silk.”
“Silk?”
“Yes. Everything was silk, really nice quality with beautiful colors, and he tied a silk headscarf around my head, and tied one around his own head. He kept saying how good it felt on the skin, wanted me to feel it. It was quite nice on the skin, but it was just silk—it didn’t turn me on. It was like some Middle Eastern show, him being so black in this purple scarf, and when I left he gave me the scarf. He wanted to give me money, but I refused. I was pretty depressed—I suppose I was in love with him, and wanted it to go on a bit longer—and I was disappointed, you know, that he wanted to make that video, that he was like the others, only more so, in a way.”
I take a photograph out of my pocket and hold it for her. Kat winces. “I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard about her. I mean, you know what people are like, they love to see you suffer? About two years after that night with Bradley, people started telling me about this woman he’d been seen with. The way they described her, that must be her. There can’t be more than one in Krung Thep like that. What a body! You can’t blame him for preferring her to me, can you? I can say it, now that it’s so long ago: that’s a fantastic-looking whore.”