‘Who said there was a connection?’ He said almost suspiciously, then when I said nothing he continued, ‘Actually there just might be. But since you mention the Bangkok murder, there was also another recent killing before the junkie, wasn’t there?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said flatly,
‘Yeah, a traveller who was murdered near the Khao San Rd about a week ago – oddly enough he was an actor. The junkie war veteran was literally a few days later.’
‘And you think these were the first murders of their kind, presuming this is a serial killer?’
His face incandescent in the glow of the cheroot. ‘No, like I just said, about two years ago there was this other chap who got snuffed in Vientiane, an eco warrior. And this is where it gets interesting…’
The candle was flickering with its last motions, Zig still had his arm curled around Kristen like some flaxen-haired hero from a children’s book. I sat down on the bed. ‘Go on.’ I said.
‘Well, this chap is petitioning to have the forests near Nong Khiaw opened to the public, I mean that’s his beef; he’s saying the NPA is a green site and everyone should be allowed to experience it. The locals call it Black Dragon Mountain, it’s been closed to the public for years.’
‘Black Dragon Mountain? Sounds like a Tintin novel. And what happened to the environmentalist?’
‘He laughed thinly. ‘Bit off more than he could chew. He got the stomach treatment. They found him dead in the river, the rats had got to his face and the only way they could identify him was his credit card. But his stomach, his stomach was wide open. There has to be a connection with the two dead in Bangkok doesn’t there?’
‘If you say so. You think someone is trying to keep people out of there?’ I asked.
‘That’s exactly what I think.’
Another voiced piped up in the darkness. ‘The style of murder, the chest opened up like bone wings, it’s Viking. They did it in my country two and a half thousand years ago… they called it the Blood Eagle.’ Zig had been listening all the time.
‘What was it supposed to represent?’ I asked.
‘It was a sacrifice. The victims were alive through most of the ordeal until the organs gave up. The soul was swallowed by the killer or priest at the moment the last breath came.’
I shut my eyes and all I could see was the photo of Skip clutching his sides.
Since Stretch needed a bunk to himself, I had to share the remaining one with James. I lay awake looking at the ceiling, listening to the rain, self-consciously keeping to my side of the bed. I waited for the sound of the Lexus cutting its engine and the measured steps of the Greyman ascending the stone stairway with his surgeon’s briefcase of scalpels… but he never came.
The next morning we snoozed until nine and rose to a burning oriental sun, it must have been well over thirty five farenheit. The town was loosely scattered around Highway 13, with a few other roads behind it crammed with guesthouses and noisy farang wandering around still drunk from a night of partying. The locals seemed miserable with their lot. Stretch’s guidebook said the place had sold its soul down the Nam Song River, a river farang came to ride inner tubes on and smoke weed. But the party in paradise had turned sour, with drug busts a common thing, and methamphetamine now doing the rounds where it had once been just weed. For once I agreed with the guidebook, I hated the place.
Still, on the bright side the low-slung town was full of young travellers, which might make it easier to lie low for a few days rather than stick out as the only westerner in the middle of nowhere.
We left our kit in the guesthouse and went out to find some breakfast. The road to Luang Prabang struck on endlessly to the north, a red line of mud crowded with palm trees and bushes. To my left I saw the mountains for the first time; jagged limestone karsts that looked like shark’s teeth, beneath them the sunlit glimmer of a river. We took a left onto the main street, bursting with tasteless video bars with ‘Friends’ playing on a loop in front of reclining cushions.
James shook his head, ‘Paradise Lost eh? They come all this way to do exactly what they do at home. Pathetic.’
I agreed with him. Stretch tapped me on the arm and whispered, ‘Tosser isn’t he?’
‘How long has he been with you?’ I asked,
‘Not half an hour longer than you, more or less invited himself on our bus.’
‘Really? I thought you’d been with him for a while?’ I whispered.
Stretch pulled a face, ‘You honestly think I’d spend me trip with that sarcastic up ‘imself wanker? I’m getting shot of ‘im when we get to Luang Prabang, otherwise I may ‘ave to chuck ‘im in fuckin’ Mekong. I mean, there’s somethin’ about him… don’t you think?’
‘They’re a funny lot in Fulham.’ I said.
We walked through the main street to the Nam Song river, gangs of twenty-something girls flouting the Buddhist modesty of the country, were scantily clad in bikinis, their faces daubed in fluorescent paint; it was like a lads mag does ‘Lord of The Flies’ photo shoot. One with a straw hat on smiled at me and sauntered over. ‘Hello mate, it’s happening large up the river at the Bong Bar if you want to get on it later. Happy hour all day… rave music, drum and base, house, and as much weed as you can smoke. And there’s a fucking great zipline over the river.’
After such a lengthy schpiel I took the flyer and winked at her. Kirsten nudged me in the rib, ‘I think she fancied you, Alain.’
‘I’m, old enough to be her Dad.’
‘Are you saving yourself for someone back home?’ she asked coyly,
I looked over to see where Zig was. ‘No. I’m afraid I’m not.’
‘Well then,’ she smiled, her Scandinavian skin seeming to glow in the morning light, ‘enjoy yourself.’
James thought it might be of cultural interest to take in the market on the way. We all went along without protest. It was an odd affair, a few stalls selling live insects, entrails and bleeding deer hoofs. Beside them were gutted rats the size of cats. They lay prostrate on wooden tables. Stretch called after me, when I turned around he had a ladle of soup in his hand; swimming around it like a pink shark fin was the tongue of an ox. The woman at the stall looked up at him in wonder, he pointed to James and shouted, ‘Oi, this is what ‘appens to people who talk bollocks!’
Then James did something peculiar; turning slowly to face Stretch, no more than ten yards away, he stared at him very calmly, as if he wished him ill. In the old sense of the word it was queer. It lasted no more than five seconds but it could have been fifty. I was aware of everything around us seeming to blur. Stretch grinned uncomfortably and threw his arms up as if to say ‘What?’ but still James continued to stare. It made my skin crawl. Then Stretch shook his head and James walked away without a word. The big man was unsettled as was I. Maybe I’d underestimated James.
We sat at a bar by a bamboo suspension bridge watching locals cleaning their carts in the shallows and cows grazing on the far bank. The rest of my party were all on their first BeerLao of the day while I stuck to Fanta. Over the river on Party Island there was a rave warming up, or maybe it had never stopped from last night. The Lao looked immured to it, continuing with their ablutions as if they couldn’t hear the intrusive baseline; perhaps like a bad smell they had to live with. People wobbled to and fro across the bridge and I realised how many farangs there were in the town. All of them looking for something intangible, a piece of knowledge to put together the puzzle of their lives… an epiphany to bring meaning to the existences waiting for them back home. Isn’t that what travel secretly is?
Occasionally a utility jeep loaded with tractor inner tubes and sunburnt kids on gap years whizzed by accompanied by the mantra, ‘Pa-rt-y, paa-rt-y!’ I didn’t figure Vang Vieng as epiphany country, or maybe I was just too old to appreciate what it had to offer.
James had disappeared
after the scene in the market, and after their beer, Kristen and Zig walked down the riverbank holding hands saying they’d catch up with us later. I sparked up a cigarette and took out a novel I’d read a few chapters of on the plane - Henri Charriere’s, ‘Papillon’. Papi was a petty thief, wrongly convicted for life and sentenced to a destiny of imprisonment in South America. He escaped from inescapable penal colonies no less than thirteen times. He protected weaker men in order to make money, this he stored up his rear in something called a ‘charger’ - basically a cigar container big enough to accommodate a few rolled notes. Watching the children and their mothers returning across the bridge to the mountains, I wondered where I might get a big old Cuban, and use the container to hide the map and key when I went to sleep.
Stretch found a woman’s mag at the bar that seemed to compliment his beer. He was quiet for at least an hour and then he looked up from the problem page. ‘He’s weird Al, did you see the look ‘e gave me in the market?’
‘I did, but I wouldn’t worry about him.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not, but I was awake when ‘e was going on about them serial killers you know? Why fill your head with that stuff. I mean, it’s not healthy is it!’
Poor sod was still spooked. I tried to reassure him. ‘I don’t know, something to talk about when people lose interest in his poxy passport stamps from Patagonia I suppose.’
‘You’re a little odd yourself mate now we’re at it, how come you knew so much about these killings he was going on about?’
I motioned to the glossy mag between his enormous fingers, ‘I try and read something intelligent now and again.’
‘I’ll have you know this is a very good read. So far I’ve learnt that cucumber is good for the bags under me eyes and that I should remember to drink at least a litre of water a day to achieve a good complexion.’
His real name was Sean. He told me he missed his daughter very much and drove a fork-lift at a factory on the outskirts of Blackburn. One day he wanted to move to Thailand and set up a bar in Ko Samui with the help of his daughter. Real softie, Stretch, and I liked him very much. Maybe I should have been more on my guard, but in the brilliant light, the luminescent green of the mountains shadowing the river beside me, I forgot for just a moment all the things that had been bothering me; even the presence of the Lexus.
We hired a couple of bikes and went for a ride to the nearby caves. The Swedes were busy looking for mosquito nets and James still hadn’t returned, so we went without him, eager to escape the farangs sat gormlessly at the water’s edge. Maybe they thought they were on Khao San Rd, watching an enormous video screen, they didn’t seem very excited by the serene view; perhaps it was uncool to be so, a demonstration of awe illustrated someone who hadn’t travelled much. I couldn’t have cared less as I careered through a stream on my clunky blue bike, racing Stretch to the nearest mountain.
We followed a track through scorched maize fields to the bottom of a karst crowded in trees. ‘Right,’ said Stretch, setting down his bicycle, ‘guide book says there’s a tall tree next to a pond that you can jump in.’ He pushed his glasses further back on his nose and scanned the horizon as if he was looking for hidden Victor Charles in the undergrowth. I noticed a solitary tree a hundred yards away, knotted with twisting branches.
‘Do you fancy it Al?’
‘Why not?’
As we climbed up its trunk there were designated levels to jump from, the aquamarine pond shrinking like a glittering eye below. Stretch stopped halfway. Farangs had carved their names into the bark near the top, among them was slashed; ‘You came this far - break the fear machine’.
Below me the final ripples of his descent settled at the edges of the pool and I watched him reach the side and climb out. As I launched myself from the top of the tree I felt perfectly calm, the breeze on my face, Stretch’s voice tinny and faraway. Thousands of white bubbles popped around my body as I hit the blue, the water impossibly cool as my lungs carried me to the surface. I wiped my nose and smiled at him. He shook his head in distaste. ‘You’ve got a fookin’ deathwish, I can’t believe you just did that!’
‘Break the fear machine, Sean.’
‘What fear machine?’
That night we all sat at a bar close to the river watching the sky turn magenta and the last of the ravers floating downriver on inner tubes. Laotians in motorized canoes puttered upstream, their gunwhales dripping with nets and bundles of fish. I’d found a cigar container for my secret materials. Not that I’d inserted it yet. Stretch was busy smoking the cigar.
‘I still don’t understand why you bought me a cigar,’ he said, ‘and a Cuban too!’
‘To Laos, everyone,’ I said changing the subject and raising my bottle of Coke. Their faces beamed back, even Stretch looked healthier after his afternoon ride. Kristen and Zig surreptitiously held each other’s hands. He looked at her and coughed as if he was clearing his throat. He had something to tell us, ‘Guys, I too would like to make a toast, we are happy for you to be the first people to know… we are to be engaged to be married.’
Kristen beamed at him, her face wide with excitement, ‘Ziggi asked me by the river today.’
Stretch got up and gave her a hug, lifting her into his arms so her legs were dangling from the ground. I shook their hands and kissed her on the cheek, ‘Congratulations, that’s brilliant.’ I said.
‘What’s all the fuss about?’ said James, pulling up a chair. I smiled at him and tried to include him in the proceedings, ‘They’re getting hitched, Zig asked her today.’ James grinned weakly and leant over to plant a watery kiss on Kristen’s cheek. ‘That’s fab, really fab.’ he said half-heartedly.
Then I noticed the man behind him at the bar. His eyes were keen and white against the chestnut of his skin, incandescing with hatred at me as if I were the devil himself. It was the same man I’d hit in the wasteland behind Chattuchak market.
I was too shocked to say anything; at first I just sat there, my leg vibrating uncontrollably. I saw the faint interstices of a net crowding in on me in the purple air, so subtle I hadn’t noticed it before, even in the terminal at Heathrow. I’d been a fool to ever think otherwise; they’d known my whereabouts as I left Vientiane, perhaps they’d waited patiently while the tyre on the truck was repaired and I talked to the old man at the roadside. Maybe he was another of their players? Meet me at the Dala Market, he said. What for? I’d be dead by then. I looked around at the other farangs in the ebbing light, the first bulbs of fireflies glowing green over the river.
On the Thai’s forehead was some kind of hurriedly applied henna tattoo, the familiar sign of two snakes twisting around Dragon Mountain. I remembered him talking to Skip and I on Khao San Rd, then quietly excused myself… said I was going to the toilet.
I walked quickly around the back of the bar to catch him on the hop, a sweat forming on my back, my stomach queasy with the sense of what was about to happen. Bangkok was a playground, I was in the real country now; a deadbeat farang with a few stragglers as my cohort. Either I went back to the guesthouse for the map – the under the armoire trick was surely running out of steam – or I faced him head on and tried to get some answers.
But when I got there, and I’d be a liar to claim I was disappointed, for my rage began to defer to common sense that it might well be another trap - he’d gone. Elusive as vapour he seemed to have disappeared. I looked up the path leading from the river’s edge and started running; up the small cement ramp and onto the mud track by a small hospital. A sickness in my stomach and mind seemed to have conjoined, there was bile in my mouth and I was running out of air, a visceral-cerebral breakdown.
I think that was the turning, the bridge I crossed after which nothing seemed too unreal, at least not completely. There were red eyes in the distance, the eyes of a witch against the last light in the sky. Slowly they merged back into the corporeal,
a mere black car. The door shut soundlessly, the man was gone and I was left standing there as the Lexus drew away. I know now that was my chance to make things right, to tell my friends they were in danger, and that I was a bad thing to be with. But I didn’t, and there’s not a day goes by that I don’t consider the truism that we all have a choice - every day, at every moment. We always have a choice.
- 26 -
‘Wakey, wakey, Rocky, it’s time for breakfast!’ I felt Stretch’s enormous hand on my back, shaking me out of sleep. I’d been dreaming about Giselle, we were in Hanoi, it was summer and the leaves were still on the flame trees. Gerald King was nowhere to be seen, I don’t think he existed. Giselle was just the way she’d been as I first perceived her, blue-eyed, freshfaced and uncomplicated, her hand in mine as we walked and talked beside the lake. Tortoises made of gold were swimming slowly around it and she had a necklace around her ankle instead of a rotten plaster.
‘Come on mate, the others ‘ave gone but I said I’d wait for you. God, it’s a lovely morning.’
I rubbed my eyes and sat on the edge of the bed, the morning sun streaming like sparkling water across the window ledge, the smell of burning wood in the air - the blessing of daylight. I tried to forget about the night before, how I’d paced angrily around the town looking for the car and very nearly taken a drink in a riverside bar.
Stretch sat opposite me excitedly, ‘Guess what I’ve got for today’s amusement?’
‘Shock me.’
He placed two bunched hands before me as if we were playing spoof,
‘Da da! Okay pick one!’
I picked the hand with nothing in it. He opened the other to reveal an enormous clutch of marijuana in a plastic bag.
‘You wouldn’t believe it, the guy literally gave it me down by the bridge. Cost me about two quid English.’
Black Buddha Page 28