Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  “But you must have thought about it, that at a crucial moment the man with the knife was going to cut everything off?”

  A shrug. “Not really. I was doing it for love, darling. You’re a child of the street, you must know what it means to have nothing to lose? And it wasn’t really a loss. He turned me into a goddess.”

  I switch the recorder off. In my mind echoes Dr. Surichai’s question: What is a transsexual? A medieval eunuch pumped full of estrogen? Did Fatima ask herself that very question now and then, in her down moments? I switch the recorder back on.

  “But you didn’t make any connection with the jeweler?”

  “No, except that that was where the money was coming from at first. Then Bill used the jeweler’s contacts to get into the yaa baa trade, and that was where the money was supposed to be coming from after that. But you know, there wasn’t much time, suddenly, to worry about anything. I’m taking the drugs, going to see the doctor, Bill’s obsessing about my throat, the Adam’s apple thing and what my voice is going to be like—even the whole devil thing just faded into the background after a while. I think Bill just put it into the back of his mind what he’d agreed with the jeweler.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Well, Bill wasn’t doing as well as he expected with his yaa baa. The shipment came about every two months. We would go to the domestic airport to collect it. I went with him just in case there was a problem that needed a translator—his Thai never did get beyond the beginner stage. The stuff was sent by some Burmese army general who paid off everyone on the border, and a local syndicate. All Bill had to do was move it from the airport to the squatters under the bridge. They’re Karen and have strong connections to the people in the jungle on the border. The syndicate didn’t really need Bill except for that one link from the airport to Dao Phrya Bridge. It would have looked strange if a Karen squatter turned up to collect a big shiny steamer trunk every few months, but an American in a Mercedes sort of went with the trunk. But Bill’s contribution was not exactly crucial and he wasn’t indispensable, so he didn’t get paid that well. I didn’t know this until quite recently, that he wasn’t getting that much money out of the yaa baa thing, despite the risk. I mean, if he’d gotten caught they would have put him in Bang Kwan for life, wouldn’t they?”

  “Probably. He would have been transferred to the States after five years, but he would have had to do time there as well. He was running a big risk.”

  “That’s right, that’s what I told him, a big risk for small bucks. I’m trying to be the good wise wife at this stage. I’m also getting curious. Dr. Surichai and his hospital do not come cheap, and if the yaa baa isn’t paying that well, and the little bits and pieces he’s doing for the jeweler aren’t paying that well either, where’s the money coming from?”

  “Did you have suspicions?”

  “Not of what was really going on, no. I knew there was a whole side to Bill that I didn’t know about, but I had no idea what that was. For a while I really wondered if he was serious about the jeweler being the devil, or a devil worshiper, you know, if there was some kind of black magic they were into. I even wondered if Bill was blackmailing him. I asked him outright a few times, Where are you getting the money for the medicines, Dr. Surichai, the hospital, all that? He would tell me not to worry about it, the money was there.”

  “But you did find out, somehow?”

  Silence. She is sitting on a sofa, I’m sitting in a large armchair.

  “You think I killed him, darling?”

  “I know you did.”

  “Little me? How on earth would I manage with all those snakes? Be real, Detective, it would have taken an army of experts.”

  Then she stands up, exactly as a woman would, elegantly and with an erotic intonation in the way she twists her buttocks, which really does seem to be unconscious. In the silence I have to admit it’s eerie just how perfectly the operation seems to have worked in her case. No wonder Dr. Surichai is so proud of himself. It is only from this angle, looking almost directly up at her neck, that I can see the tiny scar he talked about. I stand up and she escorts me to the door. The idea of killing her is ridiculous at this moment. I am under her spell and she knows it. She cocks her head slightly. In a whisper: “Not going to kill me today?” The question takes me by surprise because I’m sure she read my thoughts. She leans toward me. “Let me kill the jeweler for you, then you can do what you like with me. What do I care?” Suddenly holding my chin and staring into my eyes. “You’re an arhat, why ruin your karma on a senseless vendetta? The world needs you. Let a devil do your killing.”

  I try to move but she holds my shirtsleeve in a hand suddenly turned into a claw. “The first time you saw me, in the shop, you knew, didn’t you? I’m the other half of what you are, darling, if one of us is in the world, so must the other be. I’m your dark side. I think you realize that. Kill me if you like, but then you kill yourself.”

  She opens the door and suddenly I’m outside again, between the Chinese door gods. There is no time to ask her about the apartment, which she bought outright in her own name according to the clerk in the Lands Department, or the priceless furnishings. The cost of the penthouse was twenty million baht, or half a million dollars, but the jade collection—on display on a Chinese temple table in polished blackwood—would have been worth more than that. Then there were all the other artifacts from Warren’s shop, artistically placed on pedestals, antique tables, or just left on the floor where one might easily kick them by accident if one were not careful.

  I am left thinking how easy it would have been to kill her. The thought that I may have failed Pichai threatens to depress me. It is only counterbalanced by the opposite possibility, that she has charmed him too.

  44

  Yesterday my mother sent a messenger to the station with samples, for the Colonel and me, of the new T-shirts and tank tops she has designed. The motif is identical in both cases: under the main legend in burning scarlet—THE OLD MAN’S CLUB—the subtext in black italics: Rods of Iron. She employed a professional cartoonist to produce a convincing caricature of senior prurience: stooped but muscular, bald but sprouting pubic hair from his chin, tongue hanging out. The Colonel sent for me to ask what I think. Filial loyalty (read: a childhood of relentless brainwashing and emotional blackmail of the lowest kind) obliges me to opine that it is the work of genius.

  He takes the T-shirt in both hands and presses it against me. I have to hold it up as he stands back. “Farangs go for this sort of thing? It’s so . . . so ugly.”

  “It’s the way they are. If you give them a traditional Thai men’s club they’ll be intimidated.”

  “Really?” For a moment he stands confused, stranded in an alien psychology. “It’s not important that some of the customers will actually look like that?”

  “That’s the point. It makes them feel more secure.”

  A slow nod of understanding, or at least acceptance. “By the way, your mother and I are giving you ten percent of the shares in the business. She wants you in as a family member, and I can see the advantage of not having you passing heavy judgments on us when you go through one of your devout phases.”

  “I’m afraid I cannot accept. Making money out of women in that way is expressly forbidden by the Buddha.”

  “So is smoking dope. Anyway, I’m ordering you. Disobeying a superior is also proscribed from the Eightfold Path.”

  “Then I accept.”

  I take off the T-shirt and fold it on his table. He unfolds it to take one more look, then, reassured—if aesthetically challenged—the Colonel nods and lets me go. After all, Mother is the one who took the WSJ course on the Net. When I reach the door, he calls to me. “Sorry, I forgot. This fax came through from the American embassy a couple of days ago. It’s just one of those dumb profiling things they do in Quantico. I had it translated into Thai, but it’s the usual crap. Stuff you would know just by thinking about it.”

  I find a quiet corner of the stat
ion. The profile is only three pages long and surprisingly free of technical jargon.

  Report from the Department of Criminal Profiling,

  Federal Bureau of Investigation, Quantico, Virginia

  Category of document: Confidential, for distribution only to interested parties (permission is granted for this report to be shared with the Royal Thai Police)

  Subject: Fatima, a.k.a. Ussiri Thanya, a transsexual who underwent gender reassignment in her late twenties, born and brought up in Thailand. Father an unidentified African American serviceman (probably a draftee during the Vietnam War); mother a prostitute of tribal origin in northwest Thailand, a member of the large Karen group who reside in the border areas. Within the Thai tradition, the subject is believed to have been brought up by her grandmother in the tribal area on the border with Myanmar while her mother continued to work as a prostitute in Bangkok . . .

  Just as Vikorn said, the report is nothing one could not work out for oneself. I skip to the last paragraph.

  Save for those who experience a deep, personal and lifelong craving for gender reassignment, the long-term effect of surgical removal of the genitals is likely to be of the most appalling psychological devastation.

  The subject’s suspected reaction in murdering Bradley in an elaborate, sadistic and clever manner is entirely consistent with our expectations. However, it is highly unlikely that the subject’s rage has been assuaged. She turned Bradley into a savior figure, the only human being who differed sufficiently from the others to the extent of being basically benevolent. To him she sacrificed the only possessions to which the world apparently attached value: her genitals. With her betrayal by Bradley she would most likely have ceased to be capable of trust in any form. If to date her behavior (absent the murder of Bradley) has been relatively normal, we believe that she is simply acting from memory, or pursuing a plan of some kind which must be essentially sociopathic. The need to do to the world what the world did to her will be irresistible.

  45

  The Correctional Services and Immigration Departments collude to keep a foreigner in quarantine the moment he is released from prison, pending bundling him on a flight back to his own country. The reasons are unclear, for why would a farang ex-con be more of a threat to society than the hundreds of Thais who are released from jail every week? The rule is strict, though, and no amount of arguing and pleading on my part gained me access to Fritz while he waited in the Immigration building for the bureaucrats to arrange his ticket. The best I could do was to ascertain that he would be on the next Lufthansa flight to Berlin, which left at ten in the evening. Even at the airport he was fenced in by Immigration officials and police.

  In a fake Armani jacket, his remaining tufts of hair carefully shaved, prison tattoos on his neck, and in white pants, he could have been just another middle-aged tourist trying to be hip in Krung Thep, except for the large Band-Aid above his left ear and the walking stick. He saw me coming long before his minders did, but instantly looked away with that prison reflex. I had to use my influence to follow him airside, where the Immigration people decided their duties were completed and disappeared. Close up, I saw how strange and brand new the world now appeared to him. I was put in mind of a creature with lightning reflexes and restless habits, perhaps a sable or a mink, panicked and fascinated by the straight lines and smooth surfaces of the human world. He sat next to me on a bench near the gate where his flight would board and his eyes scanned while he spoke: “The operation at Dao Phrya Bridge is officially moonshine. Only a few of the squatters know about the yaa baa. The headman uses the contacts they made for the moonshine to distribute the meth. After all, if you can metabolize that rice whisky you can probably handle yaa baa. They’re major distributors in Bangkok and they’re run by a real big shot.”

  “Who?”

  “A cop of course. A police colonel.”

  “Did you get a name?”

  “Vikorn.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “If the information wasn’t accurate they wouldn’t have needed to beat me so much, would they?”

  “I guess not. Nobody mentioned Suvit? The squatters are in his district.”

  “No. Vikorn was the name. The way I heard it, he runs a very big operation. The squatters are only a small part of it. Maybe this Suvit works for him?”

  “Anyone talk to you about the way the marine was murdered? How it was done?”

  “No one knows how those snakes were organized so well, but everyone knows it was that katoy, the ladyboy, who did it.”

  “How are they so sure?”

  “She was seen by one of the squatters. Some Khmer on motorbikes met the Mercedes before it drove down to that slip road. Maybe they were summoned by cell phone. The marine hardly spoke Thai, so he wouldn’t have known even if she said: ‘Come kill the bastard now.’ She was seen going off with one of them. They actually escorted the marine down that slip road—they had guns, so probably the marine didn’t dare open the door even if he could.”

  I shake my head. “It doesn’t make sense. If the point was to kill him, why not just shoot him?”

  Fritz in turn shakes his head. “To answer that question, just spend a few months in a Thai jail. Death is just too ordinary for most vendettas—the point is to maximize the terror.”

  His scanning eyes saw from a monitor that his flight was boarding. He held out a hand for me to shake. Our eyes locked. He looked away. “You’re better than me. I shat on you and your mother and you saved my life. I wouldn’t have bothered, but thank you. When you go to the Buddha you can tell him you cured a German of his racist superiority complex. From the bottom of my black heart, thank you” were the last words I heard Fritz utter. I left him to return to the departure lounge.

  One should not exaggerate, at least two-thirds of the people waiting for flights were normal couples, singles, families: Western, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African. The other third consisted of Western men usually over forty-five with Thai girls invariably under thirty. What we don’t realize, we Thais, is just how simple life is in the West. Too simple. The most modest of contributions—a forty-hour week at the least demanding of mechanized tasks—earns one a car, an apartment, a bank account. Other gifts of the system—a spouse, a child or two, a small collection of friends—arrive automatically and gift-wrapped with support of every kind. A whole hemisphere, in other words, lies dying from event-starvation. It must be a subconscious demographic drive that sends these men to us; each one of those beauties hanging on their arms is a time bomb of demonic complications and explosive events. Hey, let’s hear it for Thai Girl, selflessly taking her message of love, life and lust to a jaded world!

  Complications come naturally to us, we are never without them, like our traffic jams. Like Vikorn. If only one could package him for export.

  46

  Last night the FBI invited me to supper at the Italian riverside restaurant at the Oriental hotel. With great compassion she told me not to dress up. She wore a generic pair of white linen shorts, open-neck white short-sleeved shirt, open sandals: simplicity itself, I gratefully observed. I ordered antipasto misto and calf’s liver to follow. She copied me with the antipasto and ordered a baked lasagna for herself. When the waiter came with the wine list she gave it to me, because I had told her about Truffaut and his meticulous education of my palate. I ordered a simple Barolo and made a great fuss of holding the glass to my nose, sipping decorously, then chasing the wine round my mouth with my tongue, while the wine waiter—a Thai—stared at me, before I gave Kimberley a big wink and knocked the wine back with a vulgar gulp. It was only a Barolo after all. We both realized that this was the first time I had made her guffaw, a dangerous moment in the ritual of seduction. I am ashamed to admit I did not turn off the charm as resolutely as I ought to have done, and she muttered darkly about my being too damn cute for words. I was asking for trouble.

  “Sonchai, why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But you pretend n
ot to find me attractive? A stupid woman would decide you were gay—lots of women protect their egos that way—but I’m not stupid. You’re not gay, sometimes you’re attracted, at least on a physical level, but you veer away. Time after time. Like a wild animal that sees a trap. I’m curious.”

  I cast my eye over the other patrons. Three middle-aged Western couples who were probably staying at the hotel, and at least four tables consisting of a young Western man and a Thai girl. What a good life we must offer to any young farang with a little money. An evening spent trawling the bars will secure you that beautiful young goddess of your dreams for as long as you care to rent her, and you may play out a romantic evening or two with her in an expensive restaurant under the stars with the certainty of bedding her afterwards. And all without petulance or temperament, or obligations which stretch into the future. Tip her well and she will even come to say goodbye to you at the airport. Love à la carte must surely be an improvement on the fixed menu?

  “I don’t want to feel like an ice cream.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look at them.” I wave a hand at the other tables. “Those girls don’t speak English as well as I do. They don’t surf the Net. They’ve probably never been abroad. They don’t realize they’re a new flavor from Häagen-Dazs. Anyway, they’re professionals.”

  Jones swallows hard. I feel sorry that I’ve brought her close to tears. She’s tough, though. “That’s how you see me? Another Western sleazebag, just like the farang men?”

  I don’t say anything for a beat or two. Then: “No one escapes their own culture. It’s hardwired in us, from birth onward. A consumer society is a consumer society. It may start with washing machines and air-conditioning, but sooner or later we consume each other. It’s happening to us too. But you see, the Buddha taught freedom from appetite.”

  “Him again.” A sigh. Now she is determined not to let me off the hook by changing the subject, or even talking at all. I start to grin. “What are you laughing at?”