by John Burdett
—
Now we’re stuck at the lights just before the Memorial Bridge, and a monk passes in front of us with an alms bowl and his looksit in white behind him carrying the morning’s haul of vegetarian food in a bundle of plastic bags tied up together. I almost became a monk; that could have been me there crossing the road. I still believe in enlightenment. It only takes about twenty years on minimal rations, five hours’ sleep per night, possessions reduced to one change of robes, one alms bowl, and an umbrella, unlimited concentration on emptiness, then a good monk can return to the Infinite at will. He sees everything, understands everything, is everything. That’s what Dr. Supatra’s mordu did more than half a century ago, but he is Khmer and ordained in Cambodia, which country he had to flee when Pol Pot made life impossible. In Thailand he formally disrobed and hung up his shingle as a know-all clairvoyant named Master Soon.
Soon, by the way, means zero. It was typical of Dr. Supatra to recommend him, for he is the most authentic and radical mordu in Bangkok, if not Thailand. Almost everything he predicts comes to pass. So, is his daily surgery filled with eager seekers after truth? Nope. People who claim to want to know their future avoid him like the plague. Women especially, who are the chief consumers of clairvoyant products in their endless search for emotional stability and amorous bliss and constitute eighty percent of the market nationwide, generally have nothing to do with him. He really does see, that’s his problem. His few followers hang around mainly to save him from starvation. Once I realized how unpopular he was, how close to total destitution, how even tough-minded macho types who have been to hell and back, or think they have, find him hard to hang out with, I knew he was the man for me. He just won’t tell fibs to make you feel good. No wonder he’s bankrupt. Now the lights have changed and we’re on our way.
My first conclusion on my earlier visit was that his two decades in the robes in Cambodia did not include training in shack construction. Even I, who have seen more than my share of incompetent carpentry, was impressed by the way the uprights of his hut leaned, the corrugated iron roof sagged, crossbeams seemed to have been chosen for their crookedness, the door was permanently stuck half open, and he forgot windows. Outside a woman in her early thirties was sobbing uncontrollably.
“I hope you haven’t come to see that bastard,” she managed. “I came for help and advice and he broke my heart in two minutes. He’s not a mordu, he’s a damned demon, that’s what he is.” More boo hoo hoo.
“What did he say?”
A dam broke. “He said I wasted the best years of my life on useless handsome shits who were good in bed and flattered me when I could have married a boring, honest, ugly man who would have taken great care of me and my kids and now it’s way too late, and anyway, I still haven’t even begun to give up on admiring myself in the mirror even though my looks have melted, my tits and ass have sagged, and self-love has ruined my nerves so no one, not even an honest, boring, ugly man, could possibly live with me for long, and anyway, even if I could find one I’d make his life hell by taking the piss out of him behind his back and to his face because of my insufferable narcissism that even now that I’m no longer cute makes it impossible for me to feel compassion for my fellow human beings, especially if they’re not attractive.” She paused for breath. “I couldn’t believe it, the way he went on. He said what I called love was anything that made my pussy wet, I’d been masturbating since puberty and still couldn’t stop playing with myself every time I felt insecure, and the only thing that brought temporary relief was the ruthless lust of a man with a big hard cock.” She paused. “I mean, for a holy man he sure knows a lot about women and sex.” She wiped her eyes. “If he wasn’t so skinny, old, and weak, I would have kicked him in the balls. No wonder he’s a failure. Who’s going to pay good money for that kind of crap?” She glared. “And he knew it all in less than a second. He didn’t even look at me.”
“Really?”
“He was trying to fix a hole in his roof with a plastic bag, he didn’t get off the chair he was standing on. Didn’t even turn his head. What a bastard.” She paused for breath. “He’s definitely clairvoyant, though. How the hell did he know my tits were sagging when he didn’t turn around to look at me?”
When I entered the hut he was standing on a chair, still fixing the hole in the roof. “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy,” he said, not looking around. “All your life that’s been your mantra. No wonder you’re stunted, you haven’t even begun to live your own life, you’re waiting for daddy before you begin. Get over it.”
Now he climbed down off the chair. He was taller than I expected, about five eleven, incredibly skinny like representations of the Buddha when he was starving in the forest. He wore only an old shapeless pair of shorts held up with a piece of string, and his long hair was held back in a makeshift gray bun also tied with string. It had been decades since he’d shaved. As he possessed a mixture of Chinese and Thai genes, his beard was sparse but long, drooping down from the corners of his mouth, which was almost invisible. It ended in a few white wisps. Apart from a black fire in the depths of his eyes he looked as if he had maybe a week left in the body. And his tongue, of course. That was alive and kicking.
He assessed me in a blink. “Now I see you better. That father thing is just a distraction, isn’t it? You’re like me. I saw you in a dream.”
“How’s that?”
“A total misfit. You could come from the most stable, loving, chaste, comfortable family in Thailand with a beautiful mum and a wise dad and the very best schooling, and you’d still be all fucked-up. You chose a broken home and a whore for a mother just so you’d have an excuse to be weird. Maybe you’re not so dumb after all.” An extra voltage of gleam came into his eye. “It’s your equivalent of a broken roof.” I could see he believed he’d won the battle and was pleased with himself. “It’s your great distraction. Anytime you’re in danger of having to face the real challenge of your life, you deflect. You tell yourself you’re looking for your true identity, which can only happen when you’ve found your daddy, who, incidentally, will be of no use to you at all when you finally meet him. What a psycho scam. I’m almost impressed.” He paused for breath. “It’s not entirely your fault. Man has made astonishing strides recently in all things inessential. The price we’ve paid is enormous. Stuck with an infantile description of reality that cannot come to terms with death or even lesser challenges, the eternal infant must torture himself for lifetime after lifetime, probably without end.”
—
This time when I arrive at the shack I show him the printout of the English words on the mirror. He studies it for a long moment. “Don’t you want to know what it says?” I ask.
“No. What it says has no importance. Can’t you see what it really says, smartass? It’s telling you how big your problem really is.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s not written by a human being. I saw that in a dream last night, but even I couldn’t believe it. It’s there, though, plain as day.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The individual characters. Look at that one, what’s that called?”
“It’s an E.”
“Right. There are lots of them. And they’re all the same.”
“Of course they’re all the same. They’re all Es.”
“Idiot. I mean they’re exactly the same. Same size, same shape, no variation at all. You’ve meditated, you’ve studied the Abhidharma, you know how the mind works. Say it takes a tenth of a second to make one stroke of a pen. Then there’s a gap in consciousness too brief to notice, but it’s vital to your functioning. During that gap the whole history of humanity intervenes in the form of sparks and flashes, your own personal history, the whole cosmos, actually, which of course doesn’t exist in time, but when you make the next stroke of the pen you are a different person. After a whole inhalation and exhalation nothing at all remains except the blueprint. No way the next stroke is going to be identical to the fi
rst, there has to be a subtle difference. When it comes to a whole letter, well, no normal person possessed of normal consciousness will produce exactly the same letter over and over again.”
He stares at me. I take back the printout, hold it close to study, nod, hand it back to him. “So what are you saying? Someone has a template they use to write this stuff on mirrors in blood after they’ve brutally beheaded a person?”
“No. I’m saying the hand that wrote it was human, the mind controlling that hand was not. It was not a real mind. It was a clone of a mind.”
I gape.
“That’s a terrific battle you’ve got on your hands. Try not to win it.”
“Try not to win it?”
“Sure. If you win it you’ll get conceited and start feeling too positive about life, and you’ll come back powerful and successful in the next incarnation and totally fuck up all over again and have to start over as a dog or something. If you must win, make sure it hurts so bad you don’t ever want to go through something like that again.” He shrugs. “But you probably won’t win. This is big. Very big. This is the end of the world, what you have there on that piece of paper.” He scratches his beard. “By the way, what does it say?”
I tell him. He stares at me and shakes his head.
“What?” I say.
“What? You ask what? You’re a detective, you told me. Has anything ever been so obvious?”
I take a deep breath. This guy is a master of trying your patience. Maybe it is his teaching method; at this moment it seems like a serious personality defect. “I am very sorry to be so stupid,” I say with a smile. “Clearly my modest capacity is so far behind yours it is difficult for you to relate to me. Would you graciously explain what the…” I take another breath. “What the hell you are talking about?” I say softly.
He hums tunelessly. Never before has humming filled me with rage. Little by little words emerge from the hum. Finally I realize what he is saying over and over again: “Someone has you on a hook, my friend. Someone has you on a hook.” He smiles. “Congratulations. If you survive this karma, you will be close to enlightenment. I almost envy you.” Then he frowns. “Take a look at this,” he says, using a dramatic gesture to sweep around his unbelievably squalid abode with the leaking roof, the dirt floor, a mean little brazier, one pot, a plastic bottle of water, a bamboo mat for a bed, a crude Buddha image on a high shelf. “You think this is tough? This is easy.” He points to his head. I get the message. He has tranquillity, I have the opposite. When I make to leave he grabs my arm and stares into my eyes. “You smoke weed, don’t you?”
“Ah, a little.”
“No, a lot. But probably not enough. Next time you smoke, get really, really stoned, then meditate on desolation. Concentrate on the most unpleasant death you can think of, then how it will be at the end, when you realize there never was a heaven or a morality and every single little thing you did to make your life and the world better was a total waste of time.”
“Why are you so hung up on desolation?”
“It’s where the treasure is hidden.”
—
So much for my brush with the saint. When I emerge from his shack I am surprised to find the woman from my previous visit outside staring at the river. She looks away when she sees me, as if she understands what I am going through. Maybe he puts everyone through it.
5
After I’d given myself time to think about it, I realized there was a reason why Vikorn might be happy to nail the HiSo lawyer Lord Sakagorn, he of the sky-blue Rolls-Royce and the trademark ponytail. The Colonel was from a dirt-poor subsistence farming family in Isaan and no matter how high he rose he carried with him the smoldering resentment of a people bled white by a snotty Bangkok elite who treated them like subhumans, because that’s what they honestly believe us to be. Vikorn loved skewering representatives of that class, and although he probably had nothing particular against Sakagorn, there could hardly be a more emblematic child of privilege and exploiter of deference to crucify.
“So how do we do it, Chief?” I asked.
“If you bring his lordship in, you have to justify it. He’ll come down on you like a truck, flatten you with the law.” He shook his head. “No, you don’t bring Sakagorn in without a perfect case.”
“Of what?”
The Colonel smiled as he looked down at the street. “He gambles on Colonel Ransorn’s patch. There’s an illegal casino in the car park area of a condominium block—they’ve enlarged the security hut to take over the whole of one floor of the underground car park. Inside it’s very plush, a Monte Carlo–type setup.” Vikorn checked his watch. “He’s there most evenings—starts early, after the courts close. His game is roulette. The main point for you is to take pictures. Do it ostentatiously, not only with phone cameras. Have someone with a big old-style camera with a nice bright flash. Little touches like that have an impact on the HiSo mind.”
“But there must be a lot of security. Someone like Sakagorn isn’t going to use an illegal casino unless it’s totally safe.”
“Correct,” Vikorn said. “But the casino is owned by Colonel Ransorn, who needed quite a lot of help to set it up. I charge only a minimum of interest—but of course, if Ransorn became unhelpful, I would have to charge more—or ask for a return of the loan.” He turned to face me. “Leave it with me. I’ll tell you when the security at the casino has been suspended. Probably tonight, late.”
—
The operation turned out to be simpler than I expected. At exactly eleven p.m. the casino that lies under the thirty stories of the Shambhala Palace condominium building found itself raided by a small contingent of police who behaved as if they belonged to Ransorn’s district but in fact owed their main allegiance to Sergeant Ruamsantiah. Everyone escaped except for the famous, high-flying, brilliant legal counsel Lord Sakagorn. He of the long black shiny hair, the flamboyant lemon waistcoat, the silk bow tie, dinner jacket, and smooth jowls. I sat with him in the back of the car when we returned to District 8. During the ride Sakagorn regained his composure and started throwing out a few forensic hints about how much this was going to cost me, Vikorn, and the police in general, once he got the case off the ground.
“You don’t have a chance of making anything stick. You’re not even the right crew for the district.”
I decided not to cuff Sakagorn when we took him away—after all, he is not the type to make a desperate bid for freedom in the middle of traffic, it would be inelegant. As a result, he was free to gesticulate. His performance was all the more dramatic because somehow in the scuffle he lost his silver hair clip so that his enraged face was now framed by a chaos of long, shiny hair that he smoothed back with histrionic care while he demanded to see Vikorn immediately. This was a matter to be sorted out by money and power—I had neither.
I myself felt the need for a heavy hitter to deal with Sakagorn, so I called the Colonel, who happened to be carousing at one of his clubs. His mood swung from irritation to amusement when I told him about the bust. He especially liked the detail of the lost hair clip. When we arrived at reception they told me the Colonel was waiting in the main conference room, the one with the giant LED screen.
In addition to the thumb drive for the large camera, I had my own phone pictures of Sakagorn at the casino, and also those that Ruamsantiah took. All in all I suppose there were a total of more than a hundred pictures on each of the two smart phones plus the memory card from the SLR camera.
All the time Lord Sakagorn ranted, even citing Aristotle’s The Constitution of the Athenians, while Vikorn said nothing but merely sat at the head of the table playing with the smart phones until he decided to pick one up and plug it into a cable under the giant monitor. Little by little Sakagorn stopped advocating as the photo gallery appeared in outsize pictures on the screen. After a few minutes of experimentation, which he seemed to enjoy, Vikorn found what he was looking for.
She was in her early twenties, owned the pure white skin of northern Chin
ese genes, held herself with the grace and simplicity of a virgin protected by power and money, turned to smile at Sakagorn now and then with the respect of a loyal daughter for a father figure, and became confused every time the middle-aged barrister rested a hand on her butt. Her dinner gown was midnight-black, her jewelry silver, her experience limited. Part of her wanted to look on the roulette as a child’s game; on the other hand, she would allow Sakagorn to have his way with her sooner or later—perhaps that was why he had made the rather reckless decision to take her to the casino, so that she would be excited, impressed, and perhaps a little drunk when he made his move. Her expression held the question of all young people at a certain point: Is this what I have to do to be an adult? To have arrived in the world? To be a part of it?
I have not mentioned her before, because I paid her no attention, assuming she was simply part of the casino’s entertainment. Vikorn, though, knew who she was. When he found a photo where her face was snapped at the moment Sakagorn fondled the nates of her ass, he stopped the show and left the picture on the screen. He still had not said a word to either of us, not even a “hello” to Sakagorn, who was technically his superior in the national protocol by a huge margin. Now the Colonel stared at Sakagorn.
“She is over the age of consent,” Sakagorn said in a cracked voice that could be a wail of fear or indignation—he perhaps had not decided which.
“By a day or so, perhaps,” Vikorn said. “But that’s not the point, is it?” Sakagorn stared at Vikorn for a moment, then looked away. “Are you going to tell me her father knows you intended to corrupt her at the casino, maybe slip her something to mellow her, before taking her up to the penthouse? There’s a private lift, isn’t there, from the casino all the way up to the top of the building?”