The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “But there’s another theory?”

  “Well, as we both know, there’s another player, isn’t there?”

  “The Asset ordered the bombing?”

  Bride doesn’t answer.

  “None of this explains why I’m here, now, today. Why would you spill the beans on a whole secret operation like this, just because one old derelict thinks he’s my father?”

  Once again, the Doctor seems disinclined to answer. He stares out of the window with that gargoyle expression on his face, as if he hasn’t heard.

  The long slow journey through the tunnel is over, and the truck emerges first onto bumpy cleared land, then finally onto a paved road where a people mover is waiting. The Doc explains that since we are not only nearer to Vietnam than to Phnom Penh, but, as a matter of fact, nearer to Saigon than Phnom Penh, it is easier to drive across the border than take a plane from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh.

  The border guards let us through even though I have no visa: the Doc speaks fluent Vietnamese and bribes them as a matter of course. I guess he must use the crossing a lot. Once we are in Vietnam the road is pretty clear. I am silent all the way.

  25

  The colors of Vietnam are gold and green. Mix them together and you have the muddy waters of the Mekong Delta. Keep them separate and you have the baize green of the paddy and the bright yellow dust of the elevated causeways between the fields. The French, with their legendary good taste, used those colors lavishly in their sumptuous villas, with the occasional dense blue to set them off. Oh, yes, somehow Vietnam manages to be more stunning than Thailand; she is like a beautiful sister, who was always going to be the most savagely raped. Of all the invaders, though, Big Money has perpetrated the greatest violations of a rural culture. You don’t see so much paddy or old colonial villas these days as you near the outskirts of HCMC. Capitalism has emptied Hanoi and sent everyone down to Saigon where the work is. The endless overhead cables, building sites, cement batching plants, construction cranes, and the raggedness of an entire country dug up and cemented over to make it fit to compete in the twenty-first century have quite extinguished arcadian innocence. During the journey the Doc used his cell phone to book us rooms at the Continental: “Where Fowler liked to have breakfast—you remember, in The Quiet American?”

  Now I am thinking: The Quiet American. The name of the book awakens something in me as if I have been bitten by a snake. It was that book I ransacked more than any other in my search for him. That haunting portrayal of a country at the mercy of alien idiots was, for me, all about him. That tale of a middle-aged man who falls for a bar girl (who looked in the movie just like Nong in her youth) was where I sought him more than in any other book, simply because it was better written than the others.

  There are fewer trishaws these days, but still plenty of old women in black trousers, the Chinese quarter is still called Cholon, and nobody refers to the city as Ho Chi Minh. Of course, the Continental is still there, set back a few hundred yards from the river and just behind the Opera House, still surviving and thriving, quite as if there never had been a communist victory. I order a pastis at the bar and sit outside. When the waiter arrives with the clear liquid in a glass along with a small jug of iced water, I watch with pleasure while I pour the water into the pastis and it turns cloudy, and I invoke the first words of that book: After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat. A few more sips, and I’m feeling as if I’ve been in Saigon forever.

  I have time to kill because the Doc said he needs to “recharge his batteries” after the road trip. The clerk at reception shows me on a map the shortest route from the Continental to the War Remnants Museum: left at Ly Tu Trong, across the barbecue park, then up one block to Vo Van Tan; a thirty-minute stroll, maximum, the clerk says.

  In this city people like to sit outdoors on ledges, or squat, or sit on low plastic stools in the shade of a building or Bodhi tree, and take over that spot for whole days at a time. Young women chat together, men drink beer and play a form of checkers with crown bottle tops; when hungry they send for takeaway that they consume in the space they have adopted as their daytime home. On most side streets there is at least one barber with his mirror hung from a tree or railing, a chair with a customer all soaped up and ready for the cut-throat. The barbecue park is a good-size place where both trees and people wobble in the heat and you wonder if they’re real or not. It took me an hour to reach the museum, which is unmistakable with its forecourt littered with small fighter planes, massive ordnance, khaki tanks, and bomb casings as tall as me. With so much firepower, how did they lose?

  I buy my ticket at the kiosk. When I enter the museum, though, something happens to my ears. I know that there are other tourists here, indeed there is a group of about twelve Vietnamese schoolchildren in blue uniforms who are assiduously noting the names and numbers of weapons on display, which were used against their country in the war. There is an elderly American couple, the wife supporting her tearful husband, who after only five minutes loses control and has to leave. Three French men in their forties stand stunned and uncomprehending before the guillotine that their country used before others took over the task of torture: perhaps they had expected to see evidence of American bad behavior only? But I cannot hear anything. It is as if I am viewing the place from a different dimension, where the other visitors are merely shadows.

  I do not examine the exhibits except to confirm they are the same as in that replica museum in the Cambodian jungle, then leave and cross the park again. It has been over four hours since the Doc and I checked into the hotel and I’ve not heard a word from him. He still has not told me what wormholes are. When I use my cell phone to call his room, the operator tells me he has blocked all incoming calls and left strict instructions not to be disturbed.

  I have a theory as to what “recharging his batteries” might signify. The main clue was a change in the Doctor’s mood on the final leg of the journey from Cambodia. He became impatient with the traffic, as if there were an urgent matter in the city awaiting his attention. Now I have no more doubts: it wasn’t Camel cigarettes alone that kept his head together all those years in the jungle.

  When I arrive back at the Continental I talk to the clerk, who calls the manager. I explain that my elderly companion, while exceptionally fit for his age, does have one or two health problems that need constant checking. While I’m talking I’m peeling off a great wad of dong that I changed on my way back from the museum, which doesn’t amount to much in dollars but quickly impresses the manager. When the bribe has reached a sufficient level, he holds up a hand, smiles, and selects a key from the rack. I do not ask why the manager would need a key to open a door of a room that is legally occupied. The manager slides the key gently into the lock, opens the door sufficiently to peep inside, nods at me to enter, then closes and locks the door behind me.

  The reason for extreme caution lies in the Doctor’s hands: a pipe about a yard long with a bowl sinuously emerging about a third of the way up the stem. The room reeks with the sweet smell of opium. Despite the clues, I am surprised. Why would this master chemist use an old, addictive, and toxic drug when he could have used LSD?

  The accommodation is a suite in the style of grand hotels of yesteryear: a generous sitting-out area with two chaise longues, brocade wallpaper, a bust from ancient Rome, and an arch that leads directly to the double bed. Dr. Christmas Bride reclines on one of the chaise longues. He faces the street although his eyes suggest his mind is elsewhere. When I pull up a chair to sit next to him he blinks and smiles. “It’s okay, we can talk, I’ve only had the one,” he says slowly in a dreamy voice. He nods at the pipe. “Admitting you need help is a sign of sanity,” Bride murmurs. “After a certain age, though, the help tends to be chemical in nature. People don’t really ease the psychic burdens of others and talking makes it worse.”

  The voice remains dreamy, but the mind behind is sharp enough.

  “Wormholes,” I say. “You were going to expl
ain them.”

  He makes a lazy gesture with one hand, as if he is too blissed out to actually wave it, although that’s sort of what he intends. “Just some crazy idea I thought up when I was young, ambitious, and pretentious. I first suggested it in a paper I wrote for an academic journal. One was allowed so much more imagination in those distant days. I made the wise-ass observation that the cosmos is a creation of human imagination, having all the characteristics of a Rorschach test: the ancients saw gods and goddesses, we see black holes.” He warms to his theme. “What is a black hole? It is the ultimate destroyer, it rips up suns, planets, and galaxies, shreds and destroys them, not even their light can escape—isn’t that exactly the psychology of modern man who produced two world wars and enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy humanity many times over? ’Nam itself was a black hole from which, back in the day, no light escaped.” He pauses for a number of minutes. “But it is also the way out. Perhaps the only way a materialistic consciousness can escape: through total annihilation.”

  “Go on.”

  “So I decided the only solution was to find one’s own wormhole and follow the path of destruction all the way through the tunnel to the other side. Only one direction was possible, one must allow oneself to drown in the vortex. That, broadly, was my healing method. It was the opposite to everyone else’s. My premise was that after a certain amount of irremediable damage, the mind will never return to factory settings—it has to self-annihilate and rebirth. It needs the wormhole. It needs to disappear like the Cheshire Cat and reappear at another spot in space-time. We needed the jungle.”

  “You used acid to probe and heal the damage already done by acid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it work?”

  He has reentered his secret world and does not hear the question—yet. It hangs in the air while his eyes glaze over, then become sharp and focused on some inner vision that causes him to tense his body for a moment in concentration. His expression is ruthless, hard and cruel. I’m put in mind again of an ancient gargoyle. All this takes about five minutes, so I’m surprised when he finally says in an affable voice:

  “Heartbreaking. Of all of them. What else is there to say? For forty years I witnessed, lived through, the whole catastrophe created mostly by the white man. There was really no other way of looking at it, after a while. It is as if we conquered the world through a brand-new kind of idiocy which the world is now able to reproduce without our help. But it was the white man who through his genocidal madness made possible the great revelation: modern humans do not reacquire undifferentiated consciousness through sitting on our backsides in a lotus position for six years. We’re much too far gone. We have to blow ourselves up and hope someone will put the fragments together again.” He sighs, closes his eyes. “Buddhism is too difficult for most people and Christianity is an incoherent jumble of largely Roman superstition that has nothing to do with the Jew called Jesus. Materialism is dreary: every healthy little girl or boy knows there is a heaven. Goldman and his gang are terrified that Islam will prevail in the end, being the only system offering completeness. I told them if you think like that, then you need a Second Coming to defend yourselves.”

  Something has happened in that vast unfathomable mind of his. He is like a boat that hit an invisible rock and is shuddering from the jolt: “D’you know, they took me seriously?”

  After a few moments he opens his eyes again and lays his pipe on a small glass table with a wrought-iron base on which all the opium paraphernalia is laid out. I watch him scrape the bowl clean, then prepare the opium. He uses a toothpick to gather up a small amount of black viscous matter from a piece of stiff cellophane and mixes it with some ground-up aspirin, heats the mixture with a butane lighter at the edge of the bowl, and sucks. He is certainly an experienced smoker, to judge from the way he is able to consume the whole smudge of opium in one long inhalation. He tenses himself to concentrate on preparation of the next pipe, which he hands to me at the same time as exhaling his own smoke. Now he relaxes with a long complacent sigh.

  “But you already know all this—and much, much more. I’m not being spiritual—just stating a fact. We absorb so very much more than we are conscious of.”

  I am looking at him while I fiddle with the lighter. The smoke is smooth and sweet and relaxes the lungs rather than causing me to cough. I close my eyes and there it is: Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is. I hear my own voice as if far away: “You’re saying my father was—is—also the father of children born after me, there, in the camp, to Western women?” The logic comes slowly, fighting my resistance all the way. “So this Asset, he could be related to me?”

  “Half brother,” Dr. Bride says in a matter-of-fact tone.

  I take a good five minutes to process the information. “It was he who set up this trip? That’s why he left your number on the iPhone. He wanted me to know…everything.”

  “I had no idea what he was up to. He is in an important transition phase and close to escape velocity, psychically speaking. Your phone call shocked me. In the end he left me no choice. He is driven, d’you see? In spite of everything, he has one very simple human need.”

  “For what?”

  “Love, of course.”

  26

  Next morning I rejoined Dr. Bride in his suite. Given his repertoire of personalities, I was curious as to who he might be after his opium binge. What I found first was an elderly and kindly sage, in awe of the life he had led. As an identity it was not particularly convincing; as a posture, though, it was highly attractive. I was put in mind not of the man he really was so much as the man he might have been if not for ’Nam.

  “I’ve ordered breakfast,” he said. “Shall we have it on the balcony?”

  We shifted chairs around a small marble table, then the breakfast arrived: stainless steel coffee and milk pots, Danish pastries, croissants, pains au chocolat, cheese, eggs, and cold cuts. The waiter poured the coffee and left.

  “Myths,” Dr. Christmas Bride said. “One really cannot do without them. How are you on Faust?”

  “Faust? Pact with the devil?”

  “Exactly,” the Doctor said.

  “Oh, Buddha.”

  “Yes, quite,” Bride said. He waved a hand at the assorted clumps of humans down below in the square in front of the Opera House. “Look at them,” he said, “What do they all have in common?”

  “Not a lot,” I muttered.

  “On the contrary, they have one vital thing in common. They are all more or less innocent. The tourists, the beggars, the cyclo riders, they all look out on the world with innocence and bewilderment. The poor are bewildered by their suffering, the wealthy by their privileges, but none really want to do harm, in their own way they all want to return to the same heaven you and I visited last night. We inherit a quite manic certainty that such happiness is possible, indeed it always seems to be just around the corner. All great thinkers have wondered at this mystery—except the modern ones. Something about industrial societies causes us to despise innocence at the same time as encouraging everyone to pursue happiness, when it’s perfectly obvious you can’t have one without the other. It’s very odd.”

  “I’m lost. What are you talking about?”

  He gazed out over the street, his jaw working. “In dismantling human beings, chemically, socially, psychologically, we made the same discovery, Goldman and I. Without this obsession with achieving happiness, without the carrot an inch or two out of reach but tantalizingly close—you end up with dispirited zombies, useless for operational purposes. Fit only for YouTube disinformation.”

  “Okay.”

  “So both Goldman and I found ourselves working at the same problem, from different perspectives. I was intent on healing, he on developing a human war machine. In both cases we came up against the same mystery.”

  “Yes?”

  He chuckled. “Goldman is not a philosopher or a psychiatrist or a deep thinker. In the end he came to the on
ly human being who was in a position to help. Me.”

  “Yes?”

  “The answer was simply too much, too terrifying, too awful in the style of Oppenheimer’s terrible quote from the Bhagavad Gita—‘I have become Time, slayer of worlds’—only infinitely worse. Oppenheimer only destroyed bodies and buildings. What I had discovered destroyed souls.” He let a long time pass, during which I sneaked looks at him from the corner of my eye. He seemed racked by a spiritual torment that would not let go. Finally he shook himself like a dog and stared at me. “When they realized there were going to be children born in the camp, they changed their attitude,” he said.

  As if that constituted a full and final confession, he sagged back into his chair. I was left none the wiser. He raised his ancient head that now looked something like that of a vulture with spare skin hanging at the jowls.

  “I would never have consented, d’you see? I held off until I saw what they were doing to the kids.”

  “You mean after they took them away?”

  “It was a gift they had only dreamed of. Young people without any national or cultural identity, with no legal existence at all, who if they belonged to anyone belonged to the CIA, in a country where children were looked on as chattels anyway. I told them, ‘No, no, you don’t make functional people like that. Not with sadistic exercise, enhancements and war games—too superficial, children are deep.’ ” He moaned softly to himself; I was not sure if he was expressing pleasure or pain. “They cited the Spartans. That’s when I seized the moment. I said, ‘Are you crazy? D’you have any idea what intricate and extensive mythology filled the head of a Spartan lad? In exchange for a grim material world, he lived in an inner world of gods and heroes, another kind of consciousness. For such a warrior the only purpose of life was to provide the opportunity for an honorable death. You have to start with the mind, the psyche—the body will follow. Enhance the body by all means, but don’t meddle with the mind, you’re simply not qualified.’ ” Another moan. “The first of their very sad and pathetic failures had come to light. A kid with an enhanced body who was too confused to get out of bed. A head case for life. A disaster. They said to me, ‘Okay, do it your way.’ They were scared because of what had happened to their star zombie. I said, ‘It has to be the archetypes, gods and heroes, a Jungian education. Magic is part of it.’ ” A pause while he worked his jaw. “They literally stopped up their ears: ‘Don’t tell us, keep your mumbo-jumbo to yourself, we’ll make a contract, you take the kids, you deliver them at age sixteen, we take it from there.’ ” He raised his hands and dropped them.