Bangkok Haunts sj-3

by John Burdett

  Out on the street I don't want to talk about Damrong, but I'm trapped. I have to take Kimberley back to her hotel in a taxi, and her silence presses on my consciousness like an ever-increasing weight. She doesn't even need to look at me. She stares out of her side window pretending to be diplomatic, while all the time she's adding tick by tick to the great black burden of silence.

  "Of course Chanya knows," I say after a long pause. "It was before she and I met. The reason she talked to you about the case is she's scared of the effect it's having on me. She thought you were the one person who could help on a psychological level. She feels helpless herself."

  Kimberley doesn't say anything for a while. Then she leans forward to tell the driver to take us to The Dome on the top of State Tower, instead of her hotel. It's a smart choice. A few hundred feet above the city, sitting in an open-air restaurant and cocktail lounge, naked to the stars, an exotic coconut-based cocktail in Kimberley's hand and a Kloster beer in mine, one may feel as if the ceiling of one's skull has been raised to be contiguous with the night sky: a cosmic confessional.

  "So it was like this," I say.

  3

  Unless you've been there, it's hard to understand. If I'd never met Damrong, I too would have remained bemused at the antics of men in that morbid state that you insist on calling "being in love," farang. We don't look at it quite like that over here.

  Let me get the least embarrassing part out of the way first: she seduced me effortlessly, within a week of coming to work at my mother's bar, which I still help to run. Like all good papasans, I had as a guiding principle never to sample our own services, and I had never done so. I was lonely, though, and missing my partner Pichai terribly, after he was killed in the line of duty. Like a fool, I had no idea how obvious were my feelings for the new superstar. Looking back, she probably knew how I felt before I knew it myself. At what point do a man's feelings for a woman switch from objective admiration to the psychosis of possession, against which the Buddha so vehemently counsels? I know only that it was Songkran, the Thai New Year and the hottest time in the solar cycle. That Songkran — it was about four years ago-was particularly steamy; while the Sun transited Aries, Mars pursued Venus in the unforgiving sign of Scorpio. In my lovelorn state I was reduced to sharing Proustian paeans with my computer:

  Last evening I watched from the door of the bar when she arrived at the soi on the back of a motorbike taxi wearing some new, violently colored dress that seemed somehow to embody the essence of this terrifying season, and with a haughty toss of her head, almost overendowed with its thick mane of heavy black hair, so that even her gaunt beauty was overwhelmed by this dense silken mass of shining darkness, stalked proudly into the brothel where I had been waiting for her and only her…

  Oh, dear. I guess every man in that state is transparent to the love object, right? I think it was the night after I wrote those words, around two A.M., when she just happened to be the only girl left in the bar and I was about to lock up. I had already turned off the sound system, and it seemed to me the ugly noises I made prior to locking up-rattling bottles, trash chucked in the bin, glasses sloshing in the sink-possessed the very quality of loneliness that dogged me. I looked down at the floor so as to avoid her eyes as she passed me on the way out. She played a little game of getting in my way, but I refused to fall for it. So she gently placed a hand under my jaw and raised my head until I was looking into her face. That's all it took. In our fever we didn't bother to go upstairs to the bedrooms.

  "You're the most amazing lover," she whispered afterward. Standard whoretalk, of course, and like a standard John, I really wanted to believe it.

  Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, the whole affair strikes me as quite horribly standard in its beginning, middle, and end, and I say as much to the FBI, who carefully avoided looking at me while I was outlining the sorry saga. Somehow it seemed to emerge out of the wildness of Songkran itself. Originally it was a holy festival in which sacred water was gently and lovingly poured over monks and respected elders; nowadays, though, farang have taken it over in Bangkok: pink-faced juvenile delinquents in their thirties, forties, and fifties stand guard with two-foot water pistols and squirt at passersby; in drink they become quite aggressive, until they get tired and emotional and curl up on the sidewalk with their plastic toys. Everyone who entered the bar that night was soaked to the skin; the wise kept their cell phones in plastic Ziploc bags. Madness was everywhere.

  I take a gulp of beer. Now the FBI and I are both staring at Orion in his priapic march across the sky.

  "So spare me the middle. How did it end?" the FBI says, with no sign of jealousy or any other emotional response; her voice has gone a little sandpapery, though.

  "Do women experience extreme passion the way men do?"

  "Total psychic dissolution, identity annihilated, ego shot, not sure if you're one person or two, no sense of security when you're not in bed with them, precious little when you are? Sure."

  "And how does it end, usually?"

  "The one who is suffering the most ends up with a simple choice: kill the other or get the hell out while you still can." A quick look. "You're a cop-you know better than most there's no violence like domestic violence."

  Her harsh farang truth-telling stuns me for a long moment. I wasn't expecting to come to the climax quite so early in the evening. I think maybe ten silent minutes pass before I can get it out:

  "After that first night I made her swear she would not go with any John. She would just serve drinks and flirt, and I would make up for her loss in income, whatever it was. A classic case of a gaga John buying his girl's chastity. She kept up her side of the deal for at least ten days. Then she got tipsy one night with a muscular young Englishman. He paid her bar fine and took her upstairs in front of my nose." Another long pause. "It's like you say, either you kill them or you get out. I held my guts together for as long as it took to call my mother to have her take over the bar for the rest of the night. The other girls had to tell her what had happened. I took a two-week vacation on Ko Samui. When I got back, my mother had gotten rid of her."

  Kimberley shakes her head. A compassionate smile, spiced with wicked humor, plays on her features. "So Mom saved you after all?"

  I nod. "Yes, but not only her. When I got back from Samui, Chanya had started to work for us. Spend time with the morbid, and you develop a taste for the wholesome. I don't think I would have appreciated Chanya so well if I hadn't gone out of my mind with Damrong. The universe is composed of pairs of opposites."

  In the taxi on the way back to Sukhumvit, the FBI says, "That night, when she went off with the English john in front of your nose, you very nearly went upstairs to the room where they were? You were almost out of control?"

  "Yes. My gun was in its holster under the register. I became very aware of it."

  "Then when you were on Ko Samui for those two weeks, what you were doing was fighting homicidal fantasies?"

  "All the time. They would come in waves. Mornings were my only strong time, when I could handle them. The rest of the time I used alcohol and ganja."

  "And what about her? Why did she do that? Wasn't it self-destructive? You were her boss, after all."

  "The dirt poor don't actually have selves to destroy. When they get a little power, they know it's only for a moment. They have no practice in preparing for the future. They generally don't believe they have one."

  The FBI ponders this. "Is that true?"

  "For the poor, birth is the primary disaster: owning a body that has to be fed and sheltered and looked after, along with the drive to reproduce, to continue. Everything else is kid stuff, including death."

  She sighs. I know she is thinking of the Damrong video when she says, "I was afraid you were going to say something like that."

  When I drop her off at the Grand Britannia, she says, "She would have let you do anything, right, anything at all, any perversion or degradation, just to capture your soul?"

  I answer wit
h silence. There is one other little thing, though, that the FBI wants to get off her chest before going to bed tonight.

  "That little hobby of Dr. Supatra's-is it typically Thai, or am I right in thinking she's a little eccentric?"

  I cough. "All Thais are eccentric, Kimberley. Nobody colonized us. We don't have much sense of a global norm to follow."

  "But you've seen that stuff yourself, right? I mean, it wasn't just phantoms fornicating. There were really grotesque things going on, with demons and, like, subterranean creatures. I'm talking seriously bestial. It was very clever but very morbid."

  I shrug. "She's been a forensic pathologist for more than twenty years. Imagine what her subconscious must look like."

  The FBI nods at this convenient explanation, which fits her own cultural prejudice. There's something nagging at her, though. "Son-chai, I'm getting a feeling that there are levels here, levels below levels. Are you being totally straight with me? I mean, if that stuff Supatra has on her hard disk, if that was for real, she would be world famous by now, right? There would have been investigations by National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, Scientific American, all that?"

  I have to suppress a smile at the thought of Supatra allowing herself to be the center of any kind of public attention. "Dr. Supatra is a very private person," I explain. "I think she would rather die than be involved in a media circus."

  By now the FBI is out of the cab, the door of which is still open, bending down to speak to me, her forehead a mass of wrinkles. "You mean you're saying that stuff is real? Or might be?"

  "Depends what you mean by real," I say, and gently close the door.

  Alone in the cab on the way back to Chanya, my mind insists on replaying the whole of those steamy, intense, impermissibly passionate moments with Damrong. I don't think there was a day when we didn't make love at least three times: Tell me your heart, Sonchai, tell me your pleasure. I want you to do things to me you've never done to any other woman. Sonchai, make me your slave, hurt me if you like, you can, you know.

  It might look corny in black and white, but it's heady stuff when it comes from a sorceress who has already bent your mind.

  When I reach home, I see that Chanya has waited up for me. She is watching a soap on TV (magicians, ghosts, and skeletons add spice to a kitchen-sink drama) and welcomes me with a slow blink and the eternal greeting of country folk: "Did you eat yet?"

  "I had a bite."

  The first thing I do after I kiss her is caress the Lump. It's a sort of joke between us that the fetus is the reincarnation of my former partner and soul brother, Pichai. Except it's not quite a joke. We have both been dreaming about him almost nightly, and Chanya has described him perfectly even though she never met him in the flesh. So I say, "How's Pichai?"

  "Alive and kicking." She studies my face. "Well?"

  "I showed Kimberley the video. She thinks she can check the perp's eyes using isometric technology. It's like fingerprints for the eyes. Every foreigner coming into Thailand has to have a digitalized mug shot these days, on the insistence of the U.S. They call it freedom and democracy. We should be able to catch him sooner or later."

  She puts a hand on my cheek, then checks my brow for fever. "I've never known you to be so affected by a case. Is it only because you were lovers?"

  "What else?"

  "What else? The ending, of course. What did Kimberley say about it?"

  "She can't quite handle it either. It made a strange atmosphere."

  "Even dead, that woman has the power to turn your world upside down."

  I take a couple of beats to absorb that penetrating observation. "Not only mine. The FBI isn't exactly naive, but she's in shock. It's what it does to your faith in life. Makes it that much harder to get up in the morning. You don't want to believe it, but it's hard to ignore the evidence."

  By way of answer, she takes my hand and places it on the Lump.

  4

  I have already checked out her apartment, where the security found her body, of course. It was a quick, cursory visit, though, and I have been feeling the need to return for a more thorough examination. I had plenty of time to do it yesterday, but that was a Wednesday, and you don't mess with the dead on Wednesdays. If all roads in the West lead to Rome, then all superstitions in the East lead back to India; our Brahmin mentors left precise instructions on this and other points, including color coding for days of the week; if you notice a lot of us wearing pink on Tuesdays, that's why. I don't normally follow this tradition unless something has made me nervous. Today there's a tint of Thursday orange in my socks, shirt, and handkerchief; better safe than sorry.

  Damrong's condo happens to be in a midrange apartment building in Soi 23, within easy walking distance of my mother's bar, the Old Man's Club, where I slept last night. (Okay, I confess, I didn't want to bring bad luck to Chanya and Pichai on a Wednesday night, when the black god Rahu rules the skies; I figured if I was going to come under attack from Damrong's ghost, it would be better to take the hit at the club.)

  It's late morning by the time I've finished getting the bar ready for tonight; most of the chores involve ordering beer and spirits, checking that the cleaning staff have done a good job, and taking care of the Buddha. He's a little guy, no more than two feet tall, who sits on a high shelf above the cash register; he has a huge appetite for lotus garlands, however, and shuts off the luck pronto if I forget. Before I go to Damrong's flat, I find a street vendor in a side soi with a trishaw piled high with lotus garlands, kreung sangha tan (monk baskets full of goodies like soap, crisps, bananas, sugar, instant coffee; you buy one and donate it to your favorite wat as a way of making merit), wind chimes, bamboo chairs, cut flowers. I buy three lotus garlands, take them back to the club, festoon our voracious little Buddha with them, light a bunch of incense that I hold between my hands as I mindfully wai him, and hope I've done enough to keep lucky today.

  I wait half an hour or so for my mother to appear. She arrives in a BMW with tinted windows. Her driver stops just outside the club to let her out, then drives off to a private car park in Soi 23. She has put on weight recently, with the result that her bum-hugging black leggings and tit-hugging T-shirts have given way to looser, more conservative attire. She is wearing a long tweed skirt with matching jacket (Thursday-orange threads prominent)-top-of-the-range stuff but sadly middle aged-and plenty of gold. She is the very image of a middle-class professional and could easily be a university professor. I give her a sniff-kiss on the cheek when she crosses the threshold and notes with approval that I've fed the Buddha. She sits heavily at one of the tables in the club and lights a Marlboro Red.

  "This place is so dated now, Sonchai," she says, taking in the faux jukebox with its galaxy of twinkling stars, the Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra, Mamas amp; Papas, Doors, early Beatles, and Stones posters on the wall. "We're going to have to do something to pull in the Johns. All the other bars have renovated. The girls are dancing naked in Fire House and Vixens. We're losing customers."

  I frown and shake my head. The prospect of girls dancing naked strikes me as a step down the slipper)' slope toward a more calculated form of exploitation. My mother knows my reservations and frowns in her turn.

  "Times are changing, Sonchai, and we have to change with them.

  You've done well enough from the bar-you could never survive on your cop's salary. It's time you took off the rose-colored glasses. Nine out of ten girls who apply for jobs here want to dance naked. They know that's the way to get customers. A John who isn't sure if he wants to get laid, get drunk, or go to bed early to nurse his jet lag will weaken at the sight of nipples and pubic hair. The West is sinking under the weight of its own hypocrisy, and these days more and more Chinese and Indian men are visiting the bars looking for some no-frills action. Let's face it, the girls are too poor to worry about their manners."

  "Aren't you worried about what we're going to become, chart na?"

  "The next life is determined by how generous we are in this one, how
much compassion we show, not by the extent to which we're bent by market forces."

  I know she's right, but I don't want to talk about it right now. I hand over the keys, tell her how much beer and spirits I've ordered, and kiss her goodbye like a sad but dutiful son. Once out on the street I realize how nervous I am about visiting Damrong's apartment again and think about calling my assistant, Lek, to come with me; I decide to be a farang-style man, though, and vigorously suppress the quaking in my stomach as I stroll down Soi Cowboy, where the girls who sleep upstairs at the bars are emerging in jeans and T-shirts, hungry for breakfast and digging into food from the stalls that line the street at this time of day. I emerge into Soi 23.

  There are plenty of restaurants down at this end of the soi, catering to every Western taste, and a lot of cooked-food stalls catering mostly to Isaan tastes; almost all our working girls come from the poor north and never get used to Bangkok cooking. Farther along, past the Indian embassy, it's mostly apartment buildings, some of them built with Soi Cowboy clientele in mind. Damrong's, though, is of the clinically clean, no-nonsense style designed to attract middle-income locals. On the other hand, since the owners of the units are almost all Thai, quite a lot of attention has been lavished on the guards' uniforms: white jacket, crimson sash, Turkish pantaloons, white socks, dress shoes, and a bijou cap with shiny peak. With that kind of sartorial elegance elevating ego, the guy at the door doesn't allow himself to be too impressed with my police ID and takes a while to write down the number before he calls an equally overdressed colleague to take me up to the twelfth floor. In the lift the guard tells me the reason they broke into the apartment a few days ago: an endless string of men, mostly farang and Japanese, had been calling the desk downstairs to say they were worried they couldn't get hold of her. It wasn't like her to spurn business. When they broke down the door, they found the body.