by John Burdett
“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 contrôlée 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 élan, 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 today 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 bunche
d 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 yú.”
“So what?”
“Yú is Mandarin for jade. Since the Chinese were the first to discover it, you could say it’s the original name. Those three lines mean ‘virtue, beauty and rarity,’ in other words the three qualities of jade according to Confucius.”
“See the piece on the shelf,” I say, pointing behind the window display, into the interior of the shop.
“Well, I’ll be . . .”
“It might not be the same one.”
“Oh, it’s the same one.”
Horse and rider.
In a small café in the main complex, downstairs, while we’re waiting for the shop to open, Jones says: “I did try love once. I really did. It still gets so much hype, you feel you’ve got to give it a chance, right? I think in the States we’re way past that stage, though. It’s like, in the first phase of industrialization there’s still marriage as in an undeveloped agricultural economy, meaning it lasts for life. The next phase, people get married knowing they’ll get divorced. One phase further on, and you find people marrying in order to get divorced. By the time you reach twenty-first century America, love is a blip on the career path, something that was capable of making you late for work for a week, before you got over it. The sad truth is it’s incompatible with freedom, money and equality. Who the hell really wants to be stuck with their equal for life? Human beings are predators, we like to hunt and eat the weak so we can feel strong for a moment. How about you?”
The question has taken me by surprise, not least because Jones has her hand on my thigh again. This time there can be no doubt as to her meaning and I think the talk about predation must be a kind of foreplay. My inferiority in my badly tailored khaki shirt, awful pants and truly hideous black anvil-shaped shoes is evident. I should take her hand off my thigh to make it clear I don’t want to be eaten, but instead cast around in my mind for an answer to her question. I think of Kat as I say: “Some people give their hearts only once. When love fails, they take up some occupation which reflects their bitterness.”
Jones raises her eyebrows. “Is that what I did? Became a man-hunter because my true love betrayed me?” I expect some cynical coda. Instead she mutters, “Damned right,” and takes her hand away. Jones is not a Buddhist, therefore I do not explain the endless cycle of life after life, each one a reaction against some imbalance from the one before, that reaction setting up yet another imbalance and so on and on and on . . . We are the pinballs of eternity.
At 11:20 a.m. we ride up the escalator again and I am surprised at the preindustrial feeling of anticipation in my stomach, a delicious foreboding of dangerous karma to come.
She is slightly inside the fine-art side of the shop, dusting a full-length standing Buddha from Ayutthaya with a feather duster. A gong sounds as we cross the threshold and she turns toward us, a polite smile on her face. She is wearing a simple white linen blouse from Versace with open neck projecting a delicious vulnerability, black skirt probably also by Versace to below her knees. Her string of pearls is much larger than the FBI’s, but what causes my most intense suffering is her fragrance, the name of which escapes me but not the brand: it is indisputably from Van Cleef & Arpels, no doubt flown in from their store on the Place Vendôme, the very shop where Truffaut seduced my mother’s nose even if the rest of her body remained beyond his failing powers. I pretend to sneeze slightly to have an excuse to inhale deeply. (Smell is the most animal of the senses, Truffaut advised, and like an animal a person will fall prey to a delicious intensity when he or she truly enters the universe of fragrance.)
The first words I ever hear her utter are Good morning, and I note with mounting joy how her voice—womanly, soft with Negroid timbre—so exactly matches and expresses her physical beauty.
Fatima’s father was black American, mine was white American, there the difference ends. I know she is experiencing the moment in the same way while Jones, with great professionalism, conceals her surprise at seeing her in Warren’s shop. I do not hear Jones’ spiel about seeking out special pieces for her bijou gallery in Manhattan, and neither does the spectacular woman who was Bradley’s lover. Jones’ voice could be a mile away, all I hear is Fatima’s polite reply: “Oh, how wonderful of you to think of us!”
I am pierced by her fragility, the sense of a recent loss of life-threatening proportions so similar to mine; pierced also by a perception which initially is mind-boggling, then blindingly obvious. Why did I not think of it before?
Clearly such mutual depth of emotion can only be the product of an intense relationship in a previous lifetime, and Jones’ comment about people dying, then carrying on conversations after rebirth, echoes in my head. Jones stops in mid-sentence while I float effortlessly toward Fatima across the polished floor. I have the impression of waltzing between Buddhas while I jabber in Thai about Khmer art, of which I know nothing, and—it is obvious—neither does Fatima. She explains, with a laugh, that she does not actually work here, she is filling in for someone as a favor to the boss. Here should be my opening to insert the name of Sylvester Warren, instead I let it pass. I do not want to talk shop.
Jones tries to follow us around the salon and I am pleased to see she has no idea what is going on. We are continuing not one conversation, Fatima and I, but many, perhaps hundreds, from hundreds upon hundreds of lifetimes. She is my twin. The words we use have no correspondence to the present moment, they are merely vehicles of our excitement at meeting again at last. How long has it been? A hundred years? A thousand? Now Fatima is leading me into a remote corner, near a door. It is as if she wishes to tell me something. She has taken care to choose a moment when Jones has been left behind. I see him for a split second, a face at a doorway partially opened, before he withdraws and closes the door. It was one of the Khmer who befriended Elijah, the one with the knife. I make startled eyes at Fatima, but she shakes her head to reassure me. I nod as if I understand, even though I am now thoroughly confused.
After half an hour my poor nerves cannot take any more of this intensity and I am ready to leave the shop. Fatima’s body wais to me at the threshold, my own body wais back. Thus do two dolls bow to each other while the puppet masters exchange knowing smiles from eternity. Jones follows me to the escalator. “What was that all about? You seemed to establish a rapport, anyway. Did you discover anything useful? What about Warren?”
“We didn’t talk about Warren.”
“Oh, but you got her number and address? Her ID? Her real name in Thai? You can get hold of her?”
“No.”
“So how are you going to find her again if she doesn’t really work there? Don’t you want to interview her? Isn’t she the last person to be seen with Bradley alive? Isn’t she a suspect? Wasn’t she the one in the car when you followed Bradley from the airport?” Exasperated. “Don’t you want to know
who did it?”
“I know who did it.”
“Who?”
“Bradley did it. To himself. With help from Warren.”
I am walking quickly toward Jones’ hired car, in which the driver is waiting with the engine running for the air-conditioning. Jones is sweating in the heat with the effort to catch up. “Wait a minute, are you for real? Are you saying that Bradley committed suicide using—oh, I get it. We’re back to the Buddha, right? It’s a point about karma you’re making here? You’ve just beamed yourself up to that point five miles above the earth where good Thai cops go when they die or get confused—or fall in love. Have you any idea how unsophisticated you looked just now? Like a teenage boy. I’ve never seen anything so unprofessional.”
“If you didn’t love crooks you would never have become a cop,” I snap.
Her jaw hangs open. She is truly baffled and, for once, stumped for something to say.
We are in the back seat of the Mercedes after the FBI has slammed the door shut on her side. I am trying to find the key to our past lives, Fatima’s and mine, the trigger, so to speak, that set us off on our centuries-old game of hide-and-seek.
“Shit.” Jones fixes her eyes at some point out of her side window while we wait in traffic. “If I’d known I’d have gotten her number myself. This is like being a cop in ancient Egypt.”
Hiding a smirk: “You remember?”
She continues to grumble in my left ear while I try to disentangle great reams of karmic information that are flashing through my head. I have never experienced this before, not with such intensity. “You have to have forgiveness,” I mutter. “It’s the only way back.”