Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  “Intense shivering,” I confirm, while the doctor looks at me with an air of concentration. “His whole body seemed to go into convulsions—it was hard to say what was natural and what was the effect of the drug.”

  “A condition of drug-induced terror causing extreme aggression, I would guess. Compulsive writhing?”

  “I would say so.”

  Trakit nods. “Poor poor thing. There’s no literature on that kind of drug poisoning in reptiles, but one can imagine. The drug would have induced an intense thirst, and its nerves were all on fire. Similar to being thrown into a vat of acid. What I can’t understand is how anyone could have accomplished such perfect timing. Drugging all the snakes at the same time is a feat in itself, but getting a seventeen-foot python stoned at the same time as twenty or so cobras is beyond anything I could work out for myself, even if I wanted to.” She gives me an empty smile. “But then, I’m not a detective.”

  “That’s a very big snake.” I look at Jones, then back to the snake. It takes up the whole of a drawer that could easily fit a human being. “If someone did inject the meth through the anus in the usual way, how long before the drug reaches the brain?”

  “With reptiles you cannot answer that question as if they were mammals. Everything depends on the temperature. A cold snake may be in hibernation mode, with almost no heartbeat, and therefore very slow circulation. The drug might take half an hour to reach the brain stem. With a warmer snake, no more than two minutes.”

  “Even with half an hour to spare, it’s hard to see the logistics, given what we know of Bradley’s schedule that day. I just can’t see a bunch of guys injecting the snake and waiting for Bradley to conveniently stop the car so they can chuck it in and put those clips over the doors. Not when there are a couple dozen cobras to inject and throw in at the same time. Even if they were pointing guns at him, it’s hard to see how it all panned out.”

  “It would take more than a bunch of amateurs to handle the python once the drug took effect. Perhaps two experienced handlers could subdue it in normal circumstances. But under the influence of yaa baa, I think you would need half a dozen experienced snake handlers. Even then . . . You see, there is nothing that is not muscle, and it can twist in any direction. In a toxic frenzy, it would be virtually uncontrollable.”

  “Then we have a virtually insoluble forensic problem,” Jones concludes with a shrug.

  I look from her to Trakit to the snake. “Except that the killer solved it.”

  On the way back to the city, Jones is experiencing a moment of euphoria caused by relief of tension: “I know what you’re thinking and I agree with you.”

  “You do?”

  “The python was obviously a drug addict in a previous lifetime, right? I would guess opium or heroin, a man with some connection to the West—maybe he shot up once on Forty-second Street, and was double-crossed by Bradley in that lifetime? But what’s the connection with the Mercedes? Maybe he was a used car salesman?”

  “The python?”

  “Yep, had that Nixon look around what was left of his mouth, don’t you think? That sloping outward from the top down?”

  Apparently Jones has scored a point. I endure her triumphant leer without protest for the rest of the journey. When we hit the first of the Krung Thep traffic jams I say: “Did you get the rest of the transcripts?”

  “Of the tapes of the conversations between Elijah and William Bradley? Yes, I got them, but I haven’t read them all. There’s a ton of stuff, and as far as I can see, extremely dull and unhelpful.”

  “What about the tapes themselves, can you get those?”

  “The tapes? We’re talking a lot of volume here. After the Bradley brothers broke the ice they talked regularly, for five years. That’s quite a few hundred hours. I can get them if you like.”

  “I only want the ones near the beginning, where William is at his lowest.”

  “Okay. Any particular reason?”

  “I need to hear his voice.” To her cynical stare I add: “People rarely know how to lie with their voices, especially to intimate family members. People lie only with words. I want to know what he sounded like when he was pleading with his big brother for a life after retirement. The same big brother who tried to teach him how to get a life twenty years before and, to William’s new way of thinking, turned out to be right after all.”

  “Touchy-feely,” Jones says. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime I hate to overuse my left lobe, but wouldn’t an examination of the Mercedes hatchback be in order?”

  I look out the window, that she might not see me wince.

  36

  Cops who will not take money must earn their keep in other ways. Pichai’s exceptional marksmanship gained him a place on every shoot-out in District 8. Thanks to my English, farangs are usually shunted in my direction. We are not on any tourist circuit, so my workload in this respect is not heavy: a steady trickle of Westerners who took a wrong turn and became suddenly frightened to find themselves all alone in the Third World, a few international criminals with a specialization in narcotics, and kids like Adam Ferral.

  Sergeant Ruamsantiah sent for me this morning and when I arrived in the interrogation room Ferral was already seated in one of the plastic chairs, a hatpin through his eyebrow, a silver stud through one nostril, all the usual tattoos, a succession of rings through his ears like a ring binder, and the kind of light in his eyes which often distinguishes visitors from other planets. Ruamsantiah, a decent family man with only one wife to whom he is scrupulously faithful, who really does invest his share of the bribes in his children’s education, has no objection to tattoos but is known to dislike nose studs, eyebrow hatpins and obnoxious young farangs who do not know how to wai or show respect in any other way. He was smiling at Ferral as I entered the room.

  The sergeant was sitting behind a wooden desk, bare except for a cellophane bag of grass about three inches square, a bright red pack of outsize Rizlas, a butane lighter and a packet of our foulest cigarettes called Krung Thip, which were surely ten times more damaging to the health than the marijuana. I had been summoned to these interrogations many times; usually the farang kid’s fear is tangible and fills the room with a frozen paranoia. Adam Ferral, though, was unfazed, which was why Ruamsantiah was using that dangerous smile. Ruamsantiah had leaned his nightstick against a leg of the table. He jerked his chin at the kid without relaxing the smile.

  “I can’t work him out. Maybe you can explain it. He came into the police station on the pretext of being lost, then fished in his pockets for something and out popped the grass. It was as if he wanted to get caught. Is he a plant or a moron? Is the CIA checking us out?”

  Not a serious question. Ferral was too young and the dope too trivial. I would have put Ferral at nineteen, twenty at the most.

  “You have his passport?”

  Ruamsantiah took a blue passport with an eagle on the front out of his pocket and handed it to me. Ferral was nineteen and a few months, a native of Santa Barbara and in his visa application gave his profession as writer.

  “You publish your stuff on the Web?” I snapped at him. The question took him by surprise and fresh pink blood bloomed first in his cheeks, spreading quickly to his neck and scalp. A young nineteen surely.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Travelers’ Tales dot com?” The pink deepened to crimson. “Great site, isn’t it? Some terrific stories about Bangkok? How is yours shaping up?” Now the kid was shocked and looking at me as if I possessed Oriental clairvoyance.

  “What did you say to him?” Ruamsantiah wanted to know.

  “There’s a site on the Web for extreme tourism. It’s like extreme sports only sillier. Kids like this get themselves in jams in faraway countries, nail-biting situations which could land them in a Thai jail for five years, or get them stoned to death in Saudi Arabia, or strangled by a boa constrictor in Brazil, but there’s always a First World safety net of course, which makes it all quite safe really. Then they write abo
ut their heroic escapes from the jaws of disaster in a foreign land. It’s a way of getting published. Getting caught with ganja in Krung Thep is a favorite. According to the Net the standard bribe is five thousand baht for this quantity of dope.”

  Ruamsantiah angered, Thai-style. His lips thinned, his cheeks pinched and his pupils shrunk, but as far as Adam Ferral was concerned he was still a corrupt cop with a dumb smile on his face.

  “Ask him if he happens to have five thousand baht on him. I haven’t checked his money.”

  I translated and Ferral brightened. Immediately he pulled a small money bag out from under his black T-shirt, extracted a wad of gray notes which turned out to be exactly five thousand baht in crisp bills, which he happily laid on the table, fighting a gleeful sneer.

  Ruamsantiah’s left hand twitched. It was the one nearest the nightstick. The sergeant is more senior than me and his anger has a killer quality which I would not want to tangle with. On the other hand, I did not want to be there while he beat the living shit out of the kid, so I began to ask if he had finished with my services.

  “No. Stick around, I need you to translate. Tell him to roll a joint.” As I began to translate, Ruamsantiah laid a hand on my sleeve. “I want one of those huge things they make sometimes—with half a dozen papers.”

  I translated. “Do you know how to do that?”

  Ferral grinned and went to work. The sergeant and I watched with fascination while he moistened the strips of glue with the pink tip of his tongue and expertly patched together a long rectangle of Rizlas, licked the seam of a few Krung Thips, broke them open and poured the tobacco onto the papers. He ripped open the bag of dope with his teeth and dumped a couple of pinches on the table. The ganja was raw and matted so Ferral had to rip it up with his fingernails. Ruamsantiah picked up his nightstick and placed it very gently on the table, causing a sudden draining of blood from Ferral’s face.

  “Tell him I want the whole bag of dope in the joint.”

  Ferral’s eyes darted from Ruamsantiah to me to the stick, which remained thick and black on the table. Ferral stared at it. I felt a sinking in my own stomach, though nothing that could compare with Ferral’s fear, which caused a cold sweat to break out on his face. He was thinking exactly what I was thinking. To be beaten up is one thing. To be beaten up stoned is a whole other experience. Pain and terror magnified by a factor of hundreds.

  “Better do as he says,” I told him.

  Ferral went back to work without the comfort of irony. His hands started to shake.

  “You’ve already squashed him,” I murmured in Thai.

  “Not enough. He’ll be laughing at us as soon as he gets back to his buddies in Kaoshan Road.”

  “You’ve got him so scared he can hardly roll the joint.” In addition to the shaking, a periodic juddering caused Ferral’s hands to spill grass over the table.

  “Okay, tell him I promise not to hurt him if he does as he’s told.”

  This news calmed the kid somewhat. He even returned to his earlier presumption that we were going to party together, the three of us, and this of course would make great copy on the Net. On the other hand, his eyes could not stop sneaking glances at the stick.

  When he’d finished rolling the joint it resembled a crooked white chimney. He glanced at Ruamsantiah for permission to light up and the sergeant nodded. Ferral took only one toke before offering it to Ruamsantiah, who declined. I also declined, which left Ferral holding the gigantic joint with a deeply puzzled expression on his face.

  “I want him to smoke all of it,” Ruamsantiah said, rolling his stick to and fro under his palm, generating a kind of muffled thunder. Ferral stared at me, then the joint, but the power emanating from the black stick was too much and he took another couple of tokes.

  “He’s to inhale properly and hold it in his lungs.”

  Ferral doubled up in a genuine marijuana racking cough, then carried on.

  Ruamsantiah relented only when it became clear that Ferral would puke if he took one more toke. He had consumed three-quarters of the joint by this time and acquired fascination with tiny details: a fleck of dust floating in a shaft of light, the third whorl from the top on his left index finger.

  Ruamsantiah picked up the lighter and waved the flame in front of the kid’s eyes. Note by note the sergeant set fire to the five thousand baht. At an exchange rate of forty-three to the U.S. dollar it amounted to about a hundred and twenty dollars. Adam Ferral was not rich. This money could keep him in Thailand for more than a week, but the wonder in his eyes told of a still deeper anguish. The West dominates through wealth; for a poor Thai cop to burn it with a look of contemptuous indifference on his face was a magical act which challenged accepted reality, especially if you happened to be young and very very stoned. Worms of fire ate through the bills, sending off weightless particles of gold; Ferral saw miniature bodhisattvas riding carpets of flame. Ruamsantiah had all his attention now, his respect and his awe. The sergeant could have stopped there and Ferral would have been smart enough to absorb the lesson, but the suggestion that he was using the Royal Thai Police Force as a platform for some frivolous literary exercise had sent Ruamsantiah into a cold rage. “I’m putting him down the hole.”

  “Do you need to do that?”

  Ruamsantiah turned his rage on me. “Not compassionate enough for you? Okay, give him the choice, eight hours in the hole or a fair trial and Bang Kwan for five years. Ask him.”

  The question hardly needed to be put, but Ruamsantiah’s fury had even me in awe. “The Hole?” the kid asked, giving it a capital and leaving his mouth open in an O as the sinister word wrought havoc in its progress through his psyche.

  Ruamsantiah stood up and walked around the desk to grab Ferral by the back of the neck to march him out of the room. The last I saw of him was a wild and desperate backward glance at me, an inadequate link to civilization surely, but the only one in the vicinity. I sat in the interrogation room for a moment regretting my wiseass guesswork. I wished I hadn’t mentioned the web site. Ruamsantiah has broken hard men in that hole of his, and Ferral is neither of those things. Stoned too, on enough dope for ten joints. May Buddha help him.

  A glance at my watch reminded me that the FBI had been waiting for forty minutes and was probably working herself up into a rage of her own. I decided not to tell her about Ferral in the hole. It was going to be a difficult enough trip without that embellishment.

  The smile on Jones’ face where she sat in the back of her car was slightly unnatural, being the product of will, but I gave her full marks for effort.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ve got more than one case, right?”

  Slightly surprised by her generosity, I agreed. The FBI was in an unusual mood. When she saw how subdued I was she became touchingly solicitous: Was it something she said yesterday? She realized she can come across as arrogant and abrasive, especially in a polite, manner-conscious Buddhist society such as ours. Or was I offended that she frankly admitted how attractive she found me? That was very American, wasn’t it, to be so up-front about such a thing? People in most other cultures, especially women, would never just come out and say it like that. Or was there something else bothering me?

  The Royal Thai Police tow stolen, impounded, illegal and wrecked vehicles to a fenced and guarded wasteland on the river not more than a couple of miles from my housing project. Over the years small satellite businesses—metal stamps, scrap iron dealers, car repair shops—have grown up around the compound so that anyone ignorant of Thai ways might think it a well-planned industrial zone. A stranger might even be impressed by the dedication of the police guards who patrol the perimeter with M16s at the ready, protecting citizens’ property until due legal process has determined true ownership.

  The FBI has brought along her own kit for lifting prints, poking behind and under upholstery, which she has dragged into the small prefabricated office. Catching sight of a door which leads to a toilet, she
takes out her coveralls and disappears, returning a few minutes later alight with luminescence.

  Sergeant Suriya has reigned in this riverside kingdom for longer than I can remember; he is famous for the dexterity of his paperwork, the discipline of his men and the accuracy of his memory. He is enormously popular and generally considered one of those selfless individuals who live only to help others. His face possesses an extraordinary mobility as he checks and rechecks my own.

  “Mercedes E-class hatchback you say?” I nod miserably. “Impounded I think two weeks ago?”

  “About that.”

  “Number?” I tell him the registration number in a stilted voice, like a character in a pantomime.

  “And you want to inspect it this morning? Has it not already been inspected by a forensic team?”

  “I believe so, but the FBI wanted to look themselves. Their forensic equipment is so much more advanced than ours.”

  “I see. The thing is, the forensic team moved it around a bit, you’ll have to look for it.”