by John Burdett
"I like to practice compassion whenever possible," Vikorn says. "However, is it not one of the great insights of the Buddha that even monks need to be sustained? Even compassion needs material help."
"Certainly. A great deal of help, and it is my deepest wish that I might be able to contribute in some small way."
"For example," Vikorn says, "suppose at this very moment a servant entered this office, perhaps an ignorant and uneducated young woman, and in the process of cleaning dislodged that beautiful vase, which, let us say, is about to fall unless a person of practical ability were there to see the danger and save it."
A pause. Tanakan replies, "Such a service of compassion would be rewarded to the value of the vase and beyond."
"What is the value of the vase, Khun Tanakan?"
"It is a long time since I had it valued. The Colonel is no amateur when it comes to evaluating such items, however. What value would the Colonel put on it?"
"May I?"
"Certainly."
I assume Vikorn is now holding the vase. "Look how perfectly the potter designed these dragons more than a thousand years ago. No one in this modern age would have that kind of skill and patience, much less such an eye for beauty. Exquisite. I would say a million dollars, wouldn't you?"
An audible sigh of relief. "Certainly, I think the Colonel has valued the vase with great precision. A million dollars, no doubt about it."
"I'm afraid Khun Tanakan misunderstands," Vikorn says with irritating humility. "I was referring to each of the dragons being certainly of the value of one million dollars."
Tanakan, dully: "How many are there?"
"Quite a lot, Khun Tanakan, quite a lot."
"Would the Colonel do me the great service of counting them?"
"Not today, Khun Tanakan, not today. I would need to study the vase in much greater depth to be able to make an assessment."
Voice cracking a little: "Greater depth? I am afraid I do not understand."
"Well, Khun Tanakan is known to be a very prominent collector of such objets d'art. Therefore would he agree with me that two vases may look and even be identical and yet one may fetch a far greater price because of the stories associated with it? Is that not so? Fame, even notoriety, adds so much false value these days, like Elvis Presley's guitar. Is it not so?"
"I am afraid I am no longer following Colonel Vikorn's brilliant train of thought."
A polite cough. "Suppose we change the analogy somewhat. Suppose that the servant girl herself were holding it up high and threatening to smash it. Certainly Khun Tanakan would, in such circumstances, be entitled to take whatever measures necessary to protect his property."
"Yes?"
"On the other hand, if Khun Tanakan's measures were unfortunately to result in the untimely death of the girl…"
A strange silence. "Death of the girl?"
"I am afraid so, Khun Tanakan. I am profoundly sorry to be bringing such sad news at such a time. I think it would be insensitive of me to attempt to evaluate your exquisite vase at this moment. Another day, if Khun Tanakan will be gracious enough to spare the time?"
Defeated: "Whenever the Colonel wishes. I am at your disposal." A hesitation, then: "Is the Colonel aware that I was in Malaysia on business for the whole of last week?"
"I was not aware of that, Khun Tanakan."
"Might that be a factor in reducing the value of the vase?"
"It might, Khun Tanakan, it might. Clearly, the whole valuation needs mature consideration. Good afternoon, Khun Tanakan."
"Please, let me show you out."
As her boss opens the door, the secretary leans toward me to offer the most brazen come-on I've seen outside of the Game.
In the back of the old patrol car, Vikorn says, "How did I do?"
"Brilliant as usual. You saved his face with that vase thing. But he can say he never admitted anything."
"Sure, he could say that in court and bribe the judge to make sure he got away with it. But nobody would ever believe a word he says again, especially in the international banking community, and he loves being Mr. Big-in-Banking more than he loves life."
Vikorn and I look out of separate windows while thinking the same thought.
"Was he convincing?"
"About not knowing the girl was dead? Unclear-he's so luak yen, anything he says is going to sound artificial. And he's probably telling the truth about being in Malaysia last week. Anyway, what does it matter? The point was to show him there is more than an indiscretion for him to deal with-there's a corpse as well. I'm selling absolution from a higher crime." He passes a hand over his great wise head. "Tell you what, Sonchai. This case is getting to be one of your greatest gifts to me, and that was just so much fun with Tanakan. How about I give you twenty-one percent for charity?"
"Fine."
"Oh, I forgot to ask. Have you been down to the river to see Yammy yet?"
"Not yet. I'm still looking for Baker, remember?"
Vikorn grunts. "Oh, I forgot to tell you. We found him."
"We did? That was quick."
My Colonel taps his forehead. "Some of us are still cops, Sonchai. I told Immigration to identify all those crossings to Cambodia that don't yet have isometric software to check mug shots. There are only five, and only one of those is commonly known to farcing crooks. So I told the boys over there it was worth a hundred thousand baht." His smile is the embodiment of wisdom and compassion. "Motivation is everything in human resources. I had to let them soften him up a bit, as part of the bribe. He should be pretty compliant by the time you reach him." A couple of beats pass while he wrestles with irritation caused by the upholstery. "No hurry-he isn't going anywhere. I want you to check up on Yammy before you go."
12
When Superman morphs into Godot, you can be sure you have reached a deeper, more nuanced level of the American initiation: ask the Iraqis. It's been one excuse after another from my biological father, aka Superman. I contacted him more than a year ago, in the teeth of outraged objections from Nong ("If he wanted to know us, he would have got in touch decades ago"), and to my astonishment he replied with true Yankee enthusiasm and promised to visit as soon as his legal practice gave him a break. Since then it's been one excuse after another. Nong has begun to doubt that he really intends to come see us at all, and now we've just received an e-mail to say he's had to postpone again on the advice of his doctor. We're in the Old Man's Club at about six-thirty in the evening, and Nong is ranting about farang men in general and him in particular: "Why do they make these stupid promises they don't intend to keep, as if we're children who can't take reality straight? This is the problem with their whole culture-they think the rest of the world is as childish as they are. A Thai man would have told us to get lost, and we would have forgotten about him by now."
We are sitting at a table near the bar that is empty except for Marly, who is taking a break from her new porn career with Yammy, and Henri the Frenchman, who has sneaked in early because he's heard that Marly is here. Henri is one of those who decided tragically early in life that they wanted to be an author and didn't notice the passage of time until it was too late. Now he is short, bald, and forty-three. As is often the case with literary genius, especially the unpublished sort, Henri has no disposable income at all and just about makes ends meet through a little English-to-French translation work over the Net, which he considers a serious threat to his psychic health and intolerable for more than an hour a day ("another fucking microwave manual, mon Dieu, I don't have to translate the fuckeur. I know by heart a fucking large fucking potato takes cinq minutes, and if you wrap it in aluminum, you can expect a wonderful little firework display with lots of fine crackles and pops-there are days when I would give my membre virile for a little ambiguity, double entendre, obscure literary reference, even a well-placed adjective, nom de Dieu"), and lives in a tiny room on the notorious Soi 26, a stone's throw from the still more notorious Klong Toey area (they almost pay you to live there). He is, for reasons
of impecuniosity, therefore not the most popular customer among the girls, which might explain the pining quality of his prose. He does, though, to give him his due, own not a little of the elegance of the nineteenth-century Paris he so much wanted to inhabit and when sauced can charm them with his silver tongue:
Henri to Marly (I suspect the secret heroine of his perpetual work in progress): "When they told me you were going to be here tonight, I abandoned my work and rushed over."
"Lork?"
"Yes, and what is more, this anguish seems to have sharpened my perception, because when I saw you, I experienced all over again that joy, that leap of recognition which I experienced the very first moment I set eyes on you."
"Lork?"
"And I even love the way you say lork. On the lips of another Thai woman it is just as dreary as that pathetic English word really, but from you it possesses the intangible quality of nirvana."
"Do you want me tonight? I have time for a quick one, before I start filming down by the river."
Henri forces his features into an exaggerated beam. "I'm saving up.
Three more microwave manuals and five DVD players, and you will be mine, cherie. On the other hand, why don't you extend to me a little credit? The orders are in, I just have to do the work."
Marly, who thanks to Yammy's irresponsible encouragement has set her sights on Hollywood, raises her eyes to the ceiling in disgust and turns away. I smile at her and invite her to join us, in the hope it will put an end to Nong's moaning. "How's the filming going?"
"Fine, I think. Yammy's ting-tong-l mean, the guy is totally nuts-but he really knows what he's doing." She checks her watch.
"Give me a ting-tong Jap any day against a two-faced farang," Nong growls. I feel sad because I know where her anger comes from. She didn't expect much from renewed contact with the young American soldier she fell in love with more than thirty years ago, only a certain belated sharing, a pride in the son they made together-I haven't turned out that bad after all, compared to most leuk kreung from the Vietnam War-a chat about old times. It's his meanness of spirit she resents with its racist implication: would he have been so neglectful of a white American girl? Marly looks at me, and I raise my hands to convey helplessness. Luckily, at that moment Greg the Australian walks in. Nong has the same soft spot for him as I have for Henri, and she gives him a big welcoming smile. He responds with an inept wai that makes Nong grin and shake her head. Without waiting for his order, she goes behind the bar to open a cold bottle of Foster's and hands it to him without adding it to his slate; she is using this gesture to change her mood. "Love the way you look after me," Greg says. "You're better than twelve mums." The idea of someone having twelve mothers tickles Nong's funny bone, and she cackles at him.
A word about Greg. Endowed by nature with a metabolism that keeps him slim no matter how much Foster's he drinks, he looks quite a bit younger than his thirty-eight years. A product of what I believe his countrymen call "the tall poppy syndrome," he manifests normality to a morbid degree. He drinks beer with men, has sex with women, loves rugby, football, cricket, and gambling on what he calls the jee-jees, and is always bright and friendly with a ready "G'day" in all stages of inebriation except the last.
It is Lek, usually, who rescues dear Greg from his fits of uncontrollable sobbing at the end of a Foster's-intensive evening, usually in the lavatory, when he feels no embarrassment at being hoisted from the pit of suicidal despair by an exceptionally effeminate transsexual:
Greg says to Lek, "I'm all in fragments, mate, atomized. Me mum drove me dad away when I was a kid. Then she worked on me mind, mate. She hates men, see. All Australian women do-there's something in the food down there. Must be the mushy peas."
Lek shudders in revulsion. "Mushy peas? Oh, you poor thing."
"I never really had a family," says Greg, "grew up all by meself. I'm like the product of a Saturday night bunk-up. You're the only family I've got-that's the god's honest truth."
"How awful. Don't worry, love, we'll take care of you."
"I love the girls-they're terrific. They do more for me in an hour than anyone else ever did for me in thirty-nine years."
"Well, that's because you're all man, dear," Lek says.
"Am I? You're looking pretty good from where I'm sitting right now."
"You're drunk, love." He giggles. "Don't do that-you can't have me, darling. I'm a cop."
"You're rejecting me?"
"Me? I don't reject people, darling. I'm at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom — getting rejected is my role. Don't make me jealous, now."
Having won on the horses today, Greg is feeling generous and doesn't mind buying drinks for Henri, who is nursing his thousandth rejection by Marly. It doesn't take long for them to rebond in the medium of alcohol (they had a fight last week that neither remembered the next day), and as they get drunker, their voices get louder. I'm pinned to my seat at the table with Marly and Nong, who try not to look at me while my guts are laid out for public consumption by the two drunks.
"D'you remember her?" Greg asks Henri. "She worked here a few years ago."
Henri glances quickly over his shoulder, apparently believing we cannot hear him. "Of course, she wasn't a common prostitute. She was a born courtesan, a creature of the Belle Epoque stranded in this age of functional barbarism. I felt a certain camaraderie, but she was so formidably elegant, I didn't dare even speak to her. I was afraid of what her starting price might have been."
"I did. I saved up. She was terrific between the sheets, but she had a way of screwing your head up. After the second time I was depressed for a week. She was way out of my class."
"Shush. The boss's son had her too."
Greg is surprised. "Sonchai? He never goes with his girls."
"He fell for her. It was the original coup de foudre, avec bells and whistles."
Greg says conspiratorially, "The beat on the street is there's a snuff movie. That's how she croaked."
"Mon Dieu, I didn't know that."
"Sonchai, why don't you check upstairs to see if the cleaners did their job properly today?" Nong says, avoiding Marly's eyes and casting a furious glance at the backs of Greg and Henri.
I go upstairs to lie down on one of the beds to let my mind wander. Musing: prostitutes were the world's first capitalists. The ancients understood very well that men need sex more urgently than women. It was natural, therefore, that this imbalance should be redressed by means of cash, which hitherto nobody had had any use for. Later, of course, whores found other things to sell, and many were reincarnated as lawyers, doctors, dentists, merchant bankers, presidents, sweetshop owners, mayors, et cetera. Commerce was born, and war became just a tad less fashionable. Hey, if it wasn't for prostitution, the human race would never have got beyond the siege of Troy. Many haven't, of course.
I didn't intend to do anything more tonight-I was in lazy-Thai mode-but Henri and Greg have stirred up a gut full of bile, and now I'm restless. When I check my watch, I see it's only eight in the evening. There won't be any airplanes flying to that part of the Cambodian border where they are holding Baker, but there will be plenty of buses. I don't think I can quite stand a long, hot, uncomfortable bus ride tonight, though, so I make a call to Hualamphong railway station and manage to book a first-class overnight sleeper. It's one of those third-world treats I like to accord myself from time to time, and I'm quite excited when the train starts and the uniformed orderly comes around with his crisp white sheets to make up my bunk. Suddenly I'm a boy again taking a first-class trip up north with Nong, who is flush with dough from our sojourn in Paris with the ancient Monsieur Truffaut. Clickety-click, clickety-click, I might not have the most respectable mum in the world, but I definitely have one of the smartest. Clickety-click, clickety-click, we have money in the bank and medicine for Granma's eyes, and we've paid the rent-nothing to worry about for at least a month. Clickety-click. To know how to cheer oneself up is a first step to enlightenment. It's fun to be disobeying Vi
korn, who thinks I'm checking out Yammy at this very moment.
I wake up to a dawn in cleaner air. It's a two-track, two-platform country station, but there are a few cabs waiting for passengers. I agree on a day price with a driver, and off we go for a picnic in the country.
13
Sleepy Elephant village is a large hamlet with no municipal buildings at all. You distinguish it from the countryside because there is a slight increase in the density of population. The police station where they are holding Baker is hardly more than a large shophouse with a five-cell jail attached and a half acre of land, where a silver buffalo is inexplicably tethered. The young cop behind the desk is feeding a pet monkey when I walk in. I flash my ID and tell him I'm investigating the murder of one Damrong Baker, which doesn't ring a bell with him at all. I tell him the farang Baker, her ex-husband, is a key suspect in my investigation. He blinks at me: So what?
"Immigration," I explain. "You are holding a farang who tried to cross the border illegally yesterday. They don't have any holding cells-that's why Baker is in one of yours." His brow is like a piece of wood with fixed furrows. It occurs to me that stupidity can be exaggerated for strategic reasons.
The problem with rural policing is that there is no such thing as a rural policeman: the best you can hope for is boys and girls who can wear the uniform without getting themselves into too much trouble. "heir loyalties are always local, however, and I'm from the despised big city. By all the rules I ought to bribe him, but I resent the idea. Anyway, he's too young to help. I decide to concentrate on the monkey for a moment. It's a baby and emotionally dependent on the young cop. It looks at me with big moist eyes, then scuttles away to cling to his neck, then climb up on his head, holding his hair in bunches in its tiny hands.
Now the cop with the monkey on his head is finally looking directly at me. He's not at all sure I'm safe to talk to, and I'm not at all sure he can speak standard Thai; all I've got out of him so far is a few mumbles in the local Khmer dialect. I've got his attention, though. "Get the boss," I say softly. He nods and picks up a telephone to say a few words.