Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  I explain this to Jones, who shrugs while Suriya studies her face. “Okay, let’s go look for it. How difficult can it be to find a new Mercedes hatchback in a police compound?”

  “It’s hot.”

  “I know. I might have to take off the coveralls and get all dirty. That’s okay.”

  “You don’t want to come back when it’s cooler?”

  “You mean in the middle of the night? I’ve been here more than three weeks now, and I haven’t seen a cool day yet. It’s always hot. You want to stay here in the air-conditioning? That’s okay. Just lead me to the car, then I’ll check it on my own.”

  Suriya has no English and waits for me to translate. He has seen Jones’ professionalism, her kit and her coveralls and her unbending intent, and therefore understands my problem. He is a sensitive, intelligent man and I feel the depth of his compassion, which only makes me the more wretched. I look helplessly into his eyes.

  “You have no idea where it might be, roughly?”

  He bites his lower lip in concentration. “Maybe over there,” pointing toward the river, “or there,” pointing north, “or there,” now the south is indicated, “but now that I think of it perhaps there,” pointing west. Jones has followed his hand signals easily enough and is smiling indulgently.

  “You know, I really think I’m making progress. Two weeks ago I would have just lost it if someone wasn’t doing their work properly, but now I see your point. I mean, what the heck if we have to spend twenty minutes searching for it? It’s not as if anyone’s life depends on it. It’s not a perfect world and Westerners like me should stop acting as if it ought to be. How about that, am I improving or what? So, let’s go do this guy’s job for him and find the car.” She gives Suriya a glittering smile, which he returns. Outside in the heat, she takes my arm for a moment. “And you know something, your system works better than ours, at least on the psychological level. Be nice to incompetents and they’ll be nice back. Be nasty and they’ll still be incompetent, so what do you gain by making an enemy?”

  “That’s so true.”

  “Right. It even has a Buddhist ring to it, doesn’t it? I feel like you’ve put me on some kind of spiritual learning curve. So how do you want to do this, intuitively or systematically?”

  “Up to you.”

  “Well, since I don’t have any intuition to speak of, I’ll have to suggest we use a system. How about we start at the river, near the jetty, and work slowly west till we find it?”

  The jetty is unexpectedly robust and modern-looking, with tubular steel piles more than two feet in diameter, a smooth reinforced concrete surface and a squat, powerful-looking gantry at the end with a heavy-duty sling. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the scenery, as if visitors from the future built it on a whim, then left it for us to use. Jones doesn’t pay it any mind as she turns her back to it, stretches out both arms to establish longitude and outlines the modus operandi.

  I try to follow Jones’ instructions to the letter, walking slowly between wrecks of cars and trucks which have been stripped to their bare rusting bones, carefully scrutinizing the lines to left and right so as not to miss a late-model Mercedes Estate. About halfway through the task Jones throws me a black look down a narrow lane between the wrecks, but we don’t stop until we reach the far western end of the compound. Sweat is pouring from Jones’ hairline and she is blinking from the salt. She has undone the zip on the front of her coveralls and rolled up the sleeves. She avoids my gaze while she squats against the wire fence and I squat beside her. I say: “I’m sorry, Kimberley.”

  A deep breath. “You know, back in my country I’m accustomed to thinking of myself as a pretty bright person. Then for a few days over here I wondered if I’d been deceiving myself, and maybe I was a pretty dumb person. I got over that when I realized I was just suffering from culture shock, that everyone is dumb outside their own frame of references. So I set myself to learn patience and even a little Buddhist compassion and for a moment I was stupid enough to be pleased with my own progress. Reality has a way of kicking us in the balls, doesn’t it? Especially in Thailand, or so it seems to me.”

  I feel worse than ever and am unable to reply. I look at the ground instead.

  “At least tell me if I have correctly understood why you’ve been in such a foul mood all morning.”

  “Yes, you have understood.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase. What I’ve understood is that in Bangkok’s only police car compound all the vehicles look as if they died from vehicle plague about twenty years ago. I know the standard of living is not particularly high in your country, but there are quite a few luxury cars on the roads of Bangkok, a quite surprising number of Mercedes, high-end Toyotas, Lexuses, that sort of thing. Statistically, one would expect them to be represented at least by one or two models in the car compound belonging to the Royal Thai Police Force, wouldn’t one?”

  “Yes.”

  “And oddly enough, the only new-looking, late-model, intact vehicles I’ve seen are two BMWs parked very close to that jetty.”

  “That’s true, Kimberley.”

  “That is true, isn’t it, Sonchai? Sonchai, you have done many things to my mind since I’ve teamed up with you, but I have always forgiven you because I never caught you being dishonest. I never thought you would deceive me. Why did you let us come on this wild-goose chase when you knew all along they already sold the fucking car?”

  “There are cultures of guilt and cultures of shame. Yours is a culture of guilt, mine is one of shame.”

  “Meaning you always wait to see if the shit is really going to hit the fan?”

  “That’s not a bad way of putting it. The car could have been here.”

  “I don’t think so. That sergeant in there sold it, didn’t he, that Mercedes which constituted a major piece of forensic evidence in our little murder investigation?”

  “It’s not his fault.”

  “Oh, not his fault. Are we doing karma again, or did a tree spirit build that magnificent jetty and force the sergeant to use it to whisk away every damn car worth more than a thousand dollars, on one of those barges I bet, all the way to wherever cars go in Bangkok to experience rebirth, maybe a Buddhist monastery?”

  “It’s hard to explain to you, but it really is a good system.”

  “I thought you were an arhat, a totally noncorrupt cop?”

  “I am, but you have to bear in mind relative truth. Before there were endless wars between the districts. Sometimes the colonels came close to shooting each other. The only solution seemed to be for each district to have its own compound.”

  “Let me get this straight. With only one compound receiving cars from all over the city, it was the district in which the compound was located that was making all the dough from selling the cars and the parts?”

  “Yes. It was very bad. There were fights, shoot-outs, quite a few deaths. The profits from the cars are very good, you see, so everyone wanted a piece of it. Then we had a rank-and-file revolution. Cops from all over Krung Thep voted to appoint Sergeant Suriya as the officer in charge of the compound. He’s a devout Buddhist and maybe nearly an arhat, so everyone trusts him. He spends the proceeds on charitable works, especially for the Police Widows and Orphans Fund, and to help cops with health problems. We’ve even built a new wing on the Police General Hospital.”

  “We?”

  “We’re all proud of what we’ve achieved here. There was a party when they finished the new jetty. That crane cost twenty million baht.” I wriggle a little in the heat. “It’s just a different way of doing things, I can understand why a Westerner would have a problem.”

  She nods sagely. I think my country is having an aging effect on her, which does not make me altogether sorry. I believe the first buds of wisdom have appeared under those blue eyes. I detect just the first touches of Thai humor around her mouth. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to call the sergeant and ask him outright if he still had the car or not? Just not the Thai way of doing
things, huh? No admissions until the farang has exhausted herself digging up the unpalatable truth. So how is it no one ever complains? An expensive car gets towed away and the owner doesn’t want it back?”

  “Oh, where the owner is still alive we always offer the opportunity of buyback.”

  “Buyback?”

  “Sure. Within a specific period of time of course. After that we classify it as a wreck, which gives the government legal ownership.”

  “Government meaning the cops, right?”

  We both stand up at the same time. It really is too hot for arguments. “Who else?”

  We trudge back to the office, which is empty. From the window we watch while Suriya expertly drives one of the BMWs onto the jetty. He has already lowered the sling, and now the car sits over it, waiting to be hauled into the air. From across the river a steel barge turns against the current and makes toward the jetty. As soon as the boat is tied up, Suriya gets out of the car to work the gantry. I remember the stories of the first time he tried to work this crane; there are at least three cars drowned in the river directly under the jetty. You would never believe that now, from the great skill he exhibits in putting the car in the bottom of the barge. Merrily he skips off the seat of the gantry to fetch the second BMW. Jones is watching intently.

  “New, a BMW like that costs at least thirty thousand U.S. I guess they would go for about twenty secondhand. Is that what they would fetch over here? So in ten minutes’ work we’ve just seen the Police Widows and Orphans Fund swell by forty thousand dollars? Not bad. Does he keep any books?”

  “Oh no.”

  “That would be incriminating, huh?”

  “He doesn’t cheat us.”

  Wonderingly: “Nope, I don’t believe he does at that. Let’s go back to town, Sonchai, my learning curve has been even steeper than usual this morning.”

  When I reach the station the public area is full with the usual assortment. Three monks are next in line, then some beggars, a bag lady, a young girl about fourteen years old looking impossibly new and bright in this worn corner of the world; perhaps as many as sixty men and women of every age in clothes just a little better than rags. Everyone is waiting patiently with their diverse problems. When I inquire at the desk I discover that no one has heard of Adam Ferral and Sergeant Ruamsantiah was called away urgently to some traffic disaster soon after I left the station and has not yet returned. When I check my watch I see that more than ten hours have passed since he put Ferral in the hole.

  The hole is exactly that, a circular excavation in back of the police station originally dug for some plumbing or construction purpose, then discarded. It was Ruamsantiah who arranged for a hinged trapdoor with padlock to be cemented on top. Inhabitants are dependent on the imperfect fit of the lid for ventilation. It takes a few minutes to find the key to the padlock and someone to help me drag the kid out. When we have done so I am relieved to see that Adam Ferral can still walk. Except that it is no longer Adam Ferral who inhabits this body. He staggers around somewhat before I put my arm around him to help him into the building and out again into the public area, where he walks into the front desk, then into the monks, before I take him in hand again to lead him to some vacant chairs at the back where I sit him down. All of a sudden he bursts into chest-jarring sobs. I can think of nothing to do but pat his back and wait. Only a few of the other people in the waiting area turn to look, and then turn back again as if nothing unusual were happening. This is District 8 after all. It takes ten minutes for the sobbing to quiet, and then Ferral yanks at the hatpin through his eyebrow until it comes out and hands it to me.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I’m not doing it for you or the sergeant, pal.” His voice is surprisingly strong and firm and as far as I can recall hardly resembles the voice he used this morning. “When I was down your fucking hole I promised Christ, God, Krishna, Muhammad, Zeus, the Buddha and anyone else who would listen that if I got out of there with my mind halfway intact I’d get rid of it. My old man hates it, he calls it a disfigurement. I’ve been torturing him with it for two years. I’m keeping the nose stud, though.”

  “That’s quite a collection of deities you were in touch with.”

  “More than in touch,” Ferral says, looking at something on the far wall. “I been talking to them for ten fucking hours. They helped me, you know, with the other things. You know?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know.”

  “You been there, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  He taps my arm. “The Buddha’s great, isn’t he? Terrific sense of humor. He tell you any of those jokes of his?”

  “No, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite that intimate.”

  Ferral shakes his head. “Cracked me up, man. Really cracked me up. Well, thanks for the experience.”

  “I look forward to reading about it on the Web.”

  Ferral looks at me as if I’ve committed sacrilege and, pulling himself to his feet, staggers off in the direction of the street. In my hand a hatpin. I watch him go not without a tinge of envy. In nearly two decades of meditation the Buddha has not told me a single joke. Surely one would laugh for eternity?

  Back in my hovel I turn Pisit on. His favorite female professor is answering the standard question from a caller about what the trade of prostitution does to a woman psychologically and what kind of wife does she make for those strange farang men who marry her.

  “Prostitution ages women in ways they don’t notice at the time. It’s not the act of sex of course, which is perfectly natural and good exercise, it’s the emotional stress of continual deception. After all, the customer is only kidding one person that there is any meaning at all in what he is doing: himself. But the girl has to keep up the pretense with one or more men each night. Such stress works the facial muscles, tightening them, producing that hard look prostitutes are famous for, but more important than that, a great dam of resentment builds up in her mind. The first thing a prostitute does when she finds a man willing to look after her is to give up the sex goddess role and probably the charm too. Invariably, she makes the mistake of assuming the customer wanted to marry the real her, not the fantasy, despite the fact that he is only familiar with the fantasy. Then there is a dramatic change in appearance. Many of the girls use hormones to enhance their breasts, but doctors warn them not to continue for more than a year, because of the risk of cancer. Also, there’s not a whore in Bangkok who doesn’t walk around in six-inch platform shoes. The return to reality can come as quite a shock: from tall, bosomy porn star to flat-chested dwarf. No, prostitutes do not make great wives as a rule, but it has nothing to do with fidelity. Usually the last thing such girls want is an extramarital affair, in which they would probably be expected to play the sex goddess all over again. What they want is the right to be irritable and charmless, which they lost the moment they started on the game.”

  Caller: “So such marriages do not usually last?”

  “Sadly not. Most bar girls who marry their clients end up back in the bars within a couple of years.”

  I think of him. In my mind’s eye his uniform is torn, there is blood on his sleeves and a scythe-shaped scar impressively disfigures one side of his face when he walks into the bar in Pat Pong. He came for some relaxation from the torment of war, a beer and some female company. He is a clean-living American boy, he does not hire prostitutes, not even on R&R, but three (or more) of his closest buddies died yesterday (or the day before) and a man can only take so much. He is young, for god’s sake, twenty-two—no more than twenty-five at the most. The eighteen-year-old girl behind the bar is more than beautiful, she possesses something he didn’t know he was searching for: she is bursting with a vitality which might be the only cure for his crippling sense of loss. It is self-preservation, not lust, that moves him to pay her bar fine and take her back to his hotel. She can play the sex goddess as well as any woman, but she read the heart of this broken young man the minute he walked into the bar. It is not fant
asy he wants, but health. She uses her amazing strength to heal him until he is sure he cannot live without her. Some token of their mysterious and sacred coupling is called for. They decide to make a baby. Me.

  They were not the kind of people the professor is talking about. There was a war on and it was thirty-two years ago. I dismiss Pisit and his guest as unreliable and turn them off. In the silence I think of Fatima. Surely her dream life is almost the same as mine? It is hard to think of a father figure who would have fit the bill better than Bradley.

  37

  “No one in the market has seen the full potential of Viagra,” my mother explains over a Marlboro Red. We are sitting at a food stall after finishing a meal of tom-yum soup, fried fish, spicy cashew nut salad, three kinds of chicken and thin rice noodles on a street in Pratunam. Our table is loaded with six different dipping sauces, beer bottles, chopped ginger, fried peanuts, mouse-shit peppers and bits of lime. We are about twelve inches from the traffic jam but the stall is famous for the quality of its roast duck curry. It is so famous the police colonel in charge of the district doesn’t dare to bust or squeeze it even though its tables and chairs take up most of the sidewalk and force pedestrians to risk their lives among the traffic. Thai cuisine is the most complex, subtle, variable and generally the best in the world. It knocks the socks off fussy French and flaky Chinese, although one must give credit where it is due: during Nong’s one and only Japan trade (in Yokohama, a Yakuzi mobster with impeccable manners whose chronic migraine could only be relieved by more or less continuous sex): on my first bite of Kobe beef I forgave Pearl Harbor on your behalf, farang.

  Protected by a firewall of chili, our cooking has been immune to the corruption suffered by other great cuisines due to Western influence and the best food can still be found in humble homes and, more especially, on the street. Every Thai is a natural gourmet and cops don’t bust the best food stalls if they know what’s good for them.