by John Burdett
He lets me into the apartment using a key card but won't enter himself. He feels no embarrassment at fessing up to a ghost phobia. He even looks at me a little strangely; maybe it's because I'm half farang that I'm prepared to cross the threshold all alone?
I close the door behind me and reexperience the same sense of desolation I felt on my last visit. I've been here many times before, of course, when the heat of passion had the power to turn the white walls rosy. Even then, though, I half notice the barrenness of the place. Every prostitute I ever knew owned at least one stuffed toy-except Damrong. There were never any pictures of her either, which is quite egregious in a beautiful woman.
They found her naked on her own bed with a bright orange rope about a centimeter thick still twisted tightly around her neck to the point where it was half buried in her flesh; I have to screw my courage to the sticking point to enter the bedroom.
A hundred clips of frantic, uncontrolled lovemaking fill my head, producing a stark contrast to the silent, sterile, white room. She was always scrupulously clean; except when in the throes of passion, she confessed to disliking the messiness of sex. When I step to the bedside and look at the opposite wall, I see the elephant is still there. A photograph of a great charging tusker which seems to be bursting out of the plaster; it is the only picture in the whole apartment. When I asked her what it was doing there, as I frequently did after lovemaking, she would laugh and reply with flagrant sarcasm, He reminds me of you.
I don't miss her cruelty, but the loss to the world of that unconquerable spirit comes hard, especially when there seems no evidence of it left. The stark white pillow lies on the stark white sheet, folded back and tucked under the mattress like a bandage. She favored hard beds, so the mattress sprang back into shape the minute they took her corpse away. No flowers, no wallpaper, no dirt, no life. The clue is that there is no clue, I mutter to myself, feeling Zen-ish; it's true though, in a way. If anything, the kitchen is still more pristine than the bedroom. I open a drawer where she kept cutlery and remember that she, who entertained so many men here, only ever had one of anything: one spoon, one fork, one set of chopsticks. And yet she was not miserly. Unusually for a Thai working girl, she liked to pay for meals when we ate together in restaurants. She managed to give the impression that she had more money than me; quite often I felt as if I were the whore. At the front door I examine the lock. No sign of forced entry. When the perps came with the body-surely it took more than one to bring her here surreptitiously-they must have used her key card. How did they do it? Was she bundled up in a carpet like Cleopatra, or held up between them like a drunk? Obviously someone bribed at least one of the beautifully dressed guards to look the other way. I doubt that will prove a fruitful line of inquiry, however. My guess is that the bribe was big enough to provide a prophylactic against interrogation, even assuming I can find the right one to intimidate. No, this is not a crime scene, and the presence of her body here was merely a decoy. I close the front door behind me, thankful to have avoided contact with her ghost.
The next step in forensic investigation should be a visit to Damrong's family. She came from Isakit, the poorest part of our poorest region in the northeast, known as Isaan. I'm not ready for that journey, but duty requires me to get a local cop to make the call. I tell the switchboard to find the police station nearest to Damrong's home village. Eventually a gruff country voice comes on the line. He knows the call is from Bangkok but insists on speaking in the local Isaan tongue, which is a dialect of Khmer, so that I have to ask him to translate into Thai, and he makes a cute little protest dance out of that. Eventually he agrees to send a constable to talk to the mother. According to records, Damrong's father died when she was young. Her one sibling is a younger brother who, so far as we know, is still alive. The database shows he was convicted of possession and trafficking in yaa baa, or methamphetamines, about ten years ago.
If I didn't already know about Damrong's background, I might consider inviting her mother up to Bangkok for an interview, but I learned something about the matriarch during our brief affair which makes that strategy improbable. In the meantime I need to do some fairly intrusive investigating, using parts of the government database that will require authority from Colonel Vikorn, the chief of District 8. I've given him only a very general outline of the case so far, and I need to see him this morning. However, this is Thursday, and the Colonel and I have a curious ritual that takes place every Thursday.
Call it a consequence of globalism. Like many Thais (roughly sixty-three million, give or take a few freaks like me), Police Colonel Vikorn's interest in Western culture could, until recently, have been described as tepid, to say the least. As he aged, though, and his core methamphetamine business came to involve more and more lucrative export contracts, he decided he ought to know something about his customers and appointed me to keep him informed of important developments in Europe and the United States, changes in the street price of yaa baa being chief among them. I found myself justifying my existence by exploring whatever cropped up in The New York Times using such keywords as meths, DEA, drug abuse, porn. Porn, in this exercise, was originally merely a way of relieving the monotony of the usual bleeding-heart stories of how drugs have criminalized families who formerly could have been relied upon to destroy themselves with alcohol. Something about porn stories intrigued Vikorn, though, who seemed to see beyond mere sleaze. He demanded to know more and more, so that just recently porn has been the flavor of the month. It so happened that I found a masterly article in The New York Times archives a few days ago.* I know that Vikorn is not much interested in the Damrong case, so I have to launch into the porn report as soon as I've sat down opposite him at his vast desk.
"Listen to this," I say, and outline the article to him.
The Colonel is so intrigued, I have to translate word for word. In a nutshell, pom's evolutionary spiral can be traced from dirty postcards to video shops to mail order to instant downloads from the Net, all in about a decade during which it grew from a disreputable million-dollar industry to a massive, and therefore respectable, multi-billion-dollar industry. (Seven hundred million rentals of hardcore porn occurred in 2000: that's exactly two and a half movies per U.S.
*See Appendix.
citizen, all of which feature, on average, two or more penises penetrating an equal number of mouths or vaginas, which means that the average American vicariously participated in no less than five orgies in 2000, the year the article was published. Word is the number has more than doubled since then. I don't have the figures for homosexual porn.) In other words, as an investment, porn became irresistible to certain grandmother corporations. Like Internet gambling, porn largely survived the dot-com bubble, thus proving itself, along with eating, sleeping, dressing, and dying, as one of those industries in which a young person starting out in life cannot go wrong.
By the time I've finished my translation, Vikorn, a normally laid-back sixty-year-old exuding cynicism, is sitting bolt upright like a man who has been injected in the left ventricle with adrenaline. The innocence of fresh revelation has smoothed his brow. He looks ten years younger.
"Read those numbers again," he says; then, with a gasp of admiration, "Amazing. Farang are even more two-faced than the Royal Thai Police. You mean those mealymouthed little Western TV journalists, who get their knickers in a twist about our brothels, spend most of their lives in five-star hotel rooms paying to watch people fuck for money?"
"It's a culture of hypocrisy," I offer, sounding rather more judgmental than I intend.
But gangsters of Vikorn's stature are masters at seeing opportunity where mere mortals see only darkness. He shakes his head as if I were a poor, challenged intellect incapable of picking up a half-billion dollars lying on the floor at my feet.
"It's a culture of masturbation," he corrects, rubbing his hands together and assuming the posture of a country schoolmaster. "So, what are you waiting for? Let's make a movie."
I shake my head wisely. "No
way. You don't understand. American porn may be full of silicone tits and lipstick on pricks, the acting may be even worse than ours, and most of the women may have pimples on their bums"-Yes, I have added ten dollars to my hotel bills from time to time-just like you, hey, farang? — "but the camerawork is first class. The guys behind the viewers once believed they were going to make art-house movies for posterity. They do angles, pauses, use more than one camera, long shots, pans, slow-mo, graphic inserts, unexpected close-ups of bits of your body you've never seen yourself. They're top-notch pros," I explain with satisfaction. "Mr. and Mrs. Jerkov of Utah aren't going to buy stuff shot in a back room on Soi Twenty-six with a single Handycam. They're used to quality."
A pause while my master rubs his jaw and stares at me with those frank, unblinking eyes. "What's an art-house movie?"
I scratch my head. "I'm not sure, it's a phrase they use in the industry. Something that hopes to sell itself by pretending not to be commercial, I guess."
"Where have I heard the phrase before?"
I am about to answer that question, for I know exactly where we both first heard it. Then I realize how far ahead of me the Colonel already is. We exchange glances.
"Yammy," I say. "But he's in jail awaiting trial, at which you've made sure he'll be sentenced to death."
Vikorn raises his hands and lifts his shoulders. "The best moment to pitch him a deal, don't you think?"
With resignation I realize I've blown any possibility of carrying the Damrong case further today. Sorry, farang, I feel a digression coming on.
5
As the detective responsible for prosecuting him, I carry the whole of the Yammy file in my head as I sit in a cab on the way to Lard Yao.
He was born into a lower-middle-class family in Sendai; his father was a salaryman for Sony and his mother a traditional Japanese housewife who cooked whale and seaweed like a demon. Decisive in Yammy's early years was his father's access to Sony prototypes, especially cameras. Our hero learned to point and click soon after learning to walk and as a consequence never fully mastered verbal communication. In an introverted culture, that didn't matter much, but his written Japanese was also poor. Never mind: his father, all too aware of the depressing consequences of a life spent toeing the line, saw genius in his son's defects. Sacrificing much, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Yammy's educational flaws went unnoticed. As soon as possible his father sent him to film school. All was going well until the family took a sightseeing holiday in San Francisco, where Yamahato senior was the only tourist in two decades to manage to get run over by a tram. His mother used the insurance payment to finance the rest of Yammy's film education but refused to stay a minute longer in America. All alone with his genius and without his mum's famous seaweed-wrapped whale steaks, nevertheless Yammy had little difficulty in rising in the ranks of Hollywood cameramen.
"You're terrific," his favorite director told him. "You have this Asian attention to detail, your ego doesn't get in the way of business, and you understand perfection in art. You're gonna go a long way in advertising."
"I don't want to go a long way in advertising," Yammy replied. "I want to make a feature film."
The director shook his head sadly. He also had once wanted to make feature films. So had the first, second, and third cameramen, the gaffer, the sound engineer, and the dolly grip. "It ain't easy, kid," the director said, "and it doesn't have a whole lot to do with talent."
Yammy already knew this. If the studios appreciated talent, they wouldn't make the same old junk year after year, would they? Sure, sometimes even Hollywood did something right, but Yammy wasn't interested in the American market. He had plans to go home once he'd honed his talents to a razor edge. His heroes of the silver screen included Akira Kurosawa, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Sergei Eisenstein, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bufiuel-cinematic geniuses whom most people in Hollywood had never heard of, not even in film school. And he knew there was another, probably insurmountable, social impediment to his success in California. After all, at that particular time he and his team were filming in Colombia for a perfume advertisement that could just as economically and a lot more easily have been filmed on a mountain in Colorado. As Yammy put it in his faxes to his chums at home in Sendai, "Firstly, I do not snort cocaine, secondly I do not use coke, thirdly I do not do snow. Everyone thinks I'm an FBI plant."
Every night after filming, he and the director went through the same ritual conversation while the director arranged extravagantly long lines of white powder on a marble tabletop.
"It's about money," the director said. "To make an independent art-house movie, you need investors who can get hold of as much dough as they need whenever they need it so they don't have to worry about losing a few tens of millions on a risky venture. D'you know who fits into that category?"
"Yes," Yammy replied.
"Dealers," the director said while closing one nostril with a forefinger and bending over the table. "And d'you know who runs the dealers?"
"Yes," said Yammy.
"And d'you know who runs the mob in LA.?"
"The Bureau," said Yammy.
When they returned to California, the director decided to give the talented young Japanese his big break. The party was at an obscure and secret mansion located in the desert and well known to everyone who was anyone in the film industry. Yammy remembers women and men with eyes the size of flying saucers staring at a white mountain, in the middle of a banquet table, that even Yammy knew was not a wedding cake. Near-naked women, boys, and dozens of spare bedrooms were available for anyone to use, but most could not take their eyes off the white mountain. Within five minutes everyone except Yammy was enjoying impregnable self-confidence while bumping into furniture and talking nonsense.
"You don't have to worry about the chief of the LA. Bureau," the director explained, coming up behind Yammy and missing his step. "See, they have to get their information about who to murder in Colombia and Bolivia from somewhere, and who are they going to get it from if not the mob in LA. who buy the stuff wholesale? Bust them, and their intelligence sources dry up. That's why the chief is here tonight." Maybe the director thought he was nodding discreetly as he shook his head like a neighing horse at the short, broad guy on the other side of the table who had just grabbed a handful of the mountain. "This is freedom."
Next day, depressed, for he had made no use at all of the golden opportunity to further his career by socializing with the mob at the coke orgy, Yammy decided he just didn't have what it took to make it in L.A. and packed his bags. Back in Sendai with Mama, he called up his one pal in the film industry in Tokyo, who had managed to make a feature film about a psychotic body piercer who murders everything that moves except his pet hamster, which he ends up dying for. The film had flopped, but so what? At least he'd made one feature film in his otherwise meaningless life. Yammy paid him a visit in the Shinbashi area of Tokyo.
"Listen," his pal said after five bottles of sake, "there's only one way to make a film these days, and that is to find the kind of investors…" Yammy finished the sentence for him.
Well, farang, I know you've guessed the rest, although it happened in Jap Time, which is to say that dear Yammy slumped into alcoholic depression for nearly a decade before he succumbed to the inevitable. To be fair to Yammy, he came very close to running a successful business operation, but like a lot of beginners in my country, he made the fatal error of choosing to buy from the army instead of the police. Worse, he bought his modest ten kilos of smack from Vikom's archenemy General Zinna, which, to cut a long story short, is why Vikorn had him banged up and had the boys produce a watertight case that will inevitably get Yammy the double injection. (We changed from the bullet last year in recognition of current fashions in the global execution industry; Buddha knows why, nobody ever felt the slug enter the back of the skull. It wasn't a question of humanity, simply new-wave squeamishness. Personally I would much prefer hot lead in the cerebellum to a slow suck into the big sleep by chemica
l means. What d'you think, farang?)
So, things were not looking so good for Yammy until five minutes ago. Here's my heroic visit to him in his cell in Lard Yao (our biggest, holds nine thousand prisoners, built by the Japs as a concentration camp in World War II):
Imagine a long hot ride to a tropical middle-of-nowhere. Suddenly a not-displeasing display of lush vegetation announces the beginning of the penitentiary's extensive estate. Hold it, though-what is that terrible stench? Oh, that's the raw sewage vat in which they make difficult prisoners stand up to their necks for hours, sometimes days. Not a great place to drown. Hold your nose, and we're being patted down by the rock-faced screws and led to the visitors' room, where we sit on a single wooden seat while they bring in Yammy in cuffs and leg irons: a slim, rather handsome Japanese in his midforties with an attractively receding hairline and the sullen determination of a true artist, in an age when true art is beyond the cultural pale. There's no seat for him so he has to stand. I am delighted to be the bringer of fantastically good news and feel that I must be well in with the Buddha, since I am the instrument of his salvation. Imagine my consternation, therefore, when, after I have outlined in broad strokes Vikorn's irresistible business plan, he says, "No."
"But Yamahatosan," I say, "perhaps I have not expressed myself with sufficient accuracy. Let me be clear. In a few short weeks from now your case will come to trial. It makes no difference if you plead guilty or not-the evidence against you is overwhelming. And even if it wasn't, Colonel Vikorn knows how to get a conviction. You will be sentenced to death, and while spending the usual few years on death row, you will be gang-raped by farang and thereafter deemed an unlucky pariah by the Thais, who will cut off your supply of fresh cockroaches, thus depriving you of your only source of protein. You will probably be terminally sick long before they strap you down and get you ready for the long needles — "