Bangkok Haunts sj-3

by John Burdett

  Suddenly the dwarf woman has appeared from nowhere. She is peering around the open gate, looking in. My hostess catches her eye. "Have you eaten yet?"

  "No." The dwarf joins us, lowering herself onto the rush mat we are eating off of and sitting upright with the straight back of a child.

  "He's asking about poor Damrong."

  "I know," the dwarf says. She looks me full in the face, as if she has decided it's time I knew the truth. "She was a very strong spirit with very bad karma," she explains. "That's why she incarnated into that family. She was very strong."

  "The mother's spent a long time in jail," I say.

  "Yes."

  "There's Khmer writing under the tiger on her back."

  "Yes."

  "And I think the horoscope is in the black tradition. Did she belong to some criminal cult?"

  "Yes." She nods without casting me a glance. Even in the midst of such a dark subject, her fifty-year-old child's eyes are dancing over the house, the kids, the catastrophe of poverty, a smile always on her lips.

  "Black sorcery?" I ask.

  She shrugs. "It's not good to think about what they did in that family. It will bring bad luck."

  "Did they use their own children?"

  "Yes."

  "What about her brother?"

  For the first time a moment of concern appears in her face, then is quickly erased. "She loved him. She's the only reason he survived. A very weak spirit. Perhaps he cannot survive on his own without her." Casting me a glance: "Do you know how her father died?"

  "How her father died? Why don't you tell me?"

  "Very unlucky to talk about a violent death like that." She lays a hand on my forearm. "I'm a non-Returner."

  It's odd to hear a Buddhist technical expression used by someone who is obviously the product of some shamanistic cult, but when the Indians brought Buddhism to Thailand, much of it was absorbed into local animism. Nowadays it is quite common to hear people like the dwarf talk about "non-Returners." Buddhist monks who believe they have achieved this level are careful not to commit a blunder that will land them in the flesh yet again. Even talking in an inappropriate way can ruin your disembodiment plans.

  There are few proprieties to observe in the country. When I've finished eating, I get up to go, casting the dwarf one last glance. Without looking at me, she says, "They made the children watch, you know. Both of them, so they wouldn't turn out like their father. The girl was just about old enough to take it-like I say, she was very strong. But the boy…"

  "They watched their father die?"

  She raises a finger to her lips. As I leave, the hostess calls to me in an urgent voice, as if there is something vital she forgot to tell me. "They're Khmer, you know, not Thai people at all."

  At the main road I manage to wave down a pickup truck that will take me to the nearest bus station for a hundred baht. My driver is the best kind of country man: silent, devout, honest. In the delicious emptiness that surrounds him, my mind will not cease its endless narrative:

  A Third-World Pilgrim's Progress

  1. Born into karma too daunting to contemplate, you decide to go to sleep for life.

  2. Mother does not permit option I: you do run under the elephant, whether you like it or not.

  3. Ruthlessness and rage at least produce reactions from society, unlike good behavior, which leads to slavery and starvation. Only sex and drugs pay a living wage. You have seen the light.

  4. At the top of your game and winning, you regret aborting love. Too late, you have reached thirty and demons are massing on the horizon. Only death can save you now. One question remains: who will you take with you?

  Welcome to the new millennium.

  28

  "Where is he, Lek?"

  It pains me to use this tone, to reduce my protege to a sulky child, but I'm at the end of my rope. I've been back two days and seen no sign of Phra Titanaka.

  "I don't know," Lek says camply, pouts, and looks at the floor. We are at the station in one of the small interrogation rooms, which hardly helps Lek's mood.

  "I'm sure you got close to him while I was away. I think you're lying. I know he's got you involved somehow. I saw you talking to him at the wat."

  He jumps up, his face exploding with hurt. "I've never lied to you in my life, I couldn't lie to you — I have gatdanyu with you. You protect me every minute of the day. If you stamp all over my heart, I'll kill myself."

  I pass a hand over my face. "I'm sorry, Lek. There's no way I can pretend to you that I'm strong enough for this case. You'll have to bear with me. I think you must have seen him while I was away. You were getting on so well."

  Now his mood has changed. He comes over to comfort me. Master, I'm so sorry for you. I would do anything to help."

  "When did you last see him?"

  "He came to say goodbye when you were in Cambodia."

  "That's all?"

  "He asked me for your cell phone number. I gave it to him."

  I nod. Somehow it is inevitable that I must turn in the wind, awaiting a young monk's pleasure. There's karma here: I'm paying one hell of a price for those ten days of ecstatic misery I spent with Damrong.

  Apart from the sudden spat with Lek, I've been listless all day. Just to get out of the station, I tell Lek I'm going for a massage, but I don't really intend to have one. Outside, though, passing the Internet cafe- which has entirely lost its magic now that Damrong's brother no longer uses it-I decide I may as well have the massage anyway. A wicked impulse of pure self-destruction suggests I should go to the third floor and have the works; that maybe two hours of luscious, aromatic, oily, slippery, seminal, orgasmic self-indulgence might be exactly what I need. I know it won't help my self-esteem in the longer term, however, and I think of Chanya, even though I know she wouldn't mind, would even encourage me if it would improve my mood. So I go for my usual two hours on the second floor.

  All through the first hour my mind is hopping like a louse on a marble floor, and I hardly notice the massage. I calm down eventually, and I'm able to retrieve just an echo of the peace that once was mine by right. Then the cell phone rings. I left it in the pocket of my pants, which are hanging on a hook above the mattress. Even while the masseuse is pressing her knee into my lower spine, I grab my pants and feverishly fish out the phone.

  "I need to talk," Phra Titanaka says.

  The cop in me recognizes a weakness finally, perhaps even an admission. "Talk."

  I beckon to the masseuse to go to something less strenuous- maybe tie my feet in a knot-while I'm talking. In reality it doesn't matter what she does; my mind is focused on the monk's slow, deliberate, cool tone.

  "They sold her when she was fourteen," the disembodied voice says into my ear. "It was a family decision. I wasn't included in the discussion, but Damrong was. She agreed to work in a brothel in Malaysia as indentured labor on condition they look after me properly."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Your sorrow is a teaspoon of sugar in an ocean of bitterness."

  "I'm sorry for that too," I say.

  "It was one of those sixteen-hour-a-day jobs. She had to service twenty customers every twenty-four hours, minimum. The first night, though, they auctioned her virginity to the highest bidder. He was by no means gentle."

  "Oh, Buddha, I'm-"

  "Cut it out, or you'll miss the point. The contract was for twelve months. When she came home, she wasn't the same at all. Not at all. But she checked on how well they had treated me. She asked me and everyone in the village, and she checked my body, my weight, everything. No one had ever seen her like that before. Totally efficient, totally cold." A pause. "Of course, they hadn't treated me very well at all. They'd spent her money on moonshine and yaa baa." A long pause. "So she made them pay. Can you guess?"

  No, I tell him, I cannot possibly guess how a helpless, impoverished, used and abused, uneducated fifteen-year-old girl could punish two hardened criminals.

  "She snitched on our father to the cops.
She arranged for him to be caught red-handed during one of his burglaries." I know from his tone that he heard my intake of breath. "It worked better than she could have imagined. The cops were sick of him for his endless crimes. They killed him with the elephant game." Another pause. "She was ecstatic. I remember the shine in her eyes. Next time she took on a contract of prostitution, in Singapore this time, my mother treated me very well for the whole six months. When she was sober."

  He has closed the phone.

  When he next calls, the massage is over and I am in the process of paying the masseuse.

  "I forgot to tell you, Detective. There was a written contract- Damrong insisted on it."

  I swallow. "I see."

  "Don't tell anyone. Don't tell Vikorn."

  He has hung up. I'm thinking, Don't tell Vikorn-betray my master? I am simultaneously thinking, Yes, screw Vikorn.

  A written contract sounds unlikely, but if it exists, I'm prepared to bet Tom Smith drafted it. His masters surely would never have trusted any other lawyer. The possibility of getting hold of it seems remote. Was Damrong allowed to keep a copy? If so, where is it? Why didn't she give it to her brother for safekeeping?

  I'm at home watching Chanya cook when he calls again. I know that Chanya has grown concerned by my state of mind, that she is watching me as I fish the cell phone from my pants, which I already hung up on a hook on the bedroom door because I changed into lightweight shorts. It is almost as if I can experience her heart when my features alter at the sound of his voice: sorrow, fear, sympathy, a touch of anger because I seem to be slipping away from her.

  "Can you talk?"

  "Yes."

  "Talk about gatdanyu. What do you think of it?"

  I scratch my ear. "It's all we've got. There's no other way to organize Thailand. It's not perfect, people abuse it, especially mothers, but there's no other way for us."

  "You're half farang. You must look at it from a different point of view sometimes."

  "My blood is half farang, but I think like a Thai."

  "You've been abroad. You speak perfect English. You even speak French."

  "So?"

  "I want to know."

  My tone expresses the beginnings of exasperation. "Know what?"

  There's a long silence. Perhaps he has never formulated this thought before. "What I'm doing."

  "I don't know what you're doing."

  "I think you do. I want to know, from a farang point of view, am I going too far?"

  "Too far?"

  "The price she's making me pay-is it too high?"

  "What is the price? Did she give you instructions?"

  A pause. "Perhaps."

  "And money. She gave you all the money she made out of the contract, didn't she? How much? A lot, I think-she was very shrewd.

  That's what you don't want to face, isn't it? Two weeks ago you were a helpless monk; there was no point in dwelling on the horrors of your childhood; you were penniless; the most you could hope for in this life was to be left to pursue your meditation practice. You were already very advanced, almost an arhat. You were able to dissolve the past because the present offered no way of-" I stop deliberately in midsentence. I want to know if he's hooked or not. When he says, "Go on," I'm sure that from now on he will not be able to stop speaking to me.

  "Revenge," I say.

  Apparently this word has not yet crystallized on the surface of his mind, like a virus that does not reveal its true nature unless magnified and photographed.

  "Revenge? Where would I start?"

  "You would probably never start. You were never the one to start anything, were you? It was always her. She knew how to survive, you didn't. You spent your life as a second-stringer. You still are a second-stringer. Sure, you wouldn't know where to start when it came to revenge, but she would. Tell me what she is making you do."

  A pause. "No, I'm not going to tell you that. Anyway, I think you have already guessed."

  "She would never have left the strategy to you. I think that nothing has changed. In death as in life she is controlling you."

  "If you think like a Thai, you must know I owe her everything. If she had left instructions for me to hang myself with my robe, I would have followed those instructions to the letter."

  "How easy that would have been for you," I say gently.

  He takes a full minute to reply, then: "Yes. That's true."

  "And how hard this is for you, whatever it is she is making you do."

  "I have to do it."

  "How? Will you hire foreign mercenaries? You can certainly afford them. But it would be difficult for them to understand. Even mercenaries have rules." Listening to my own thoughts, I suddenly realize where the help will come from, when the moment arrives. "They'll be Khmer, won't they? I don't know why I didn't think of it. Retired KR foot soldiers have many advantages. One, they will do anything for money. Two, they obey orders instantly and to the letter. Three, they are plentiful and inexpensive. Four, they know all about elephants.

  Five, they will be able to disappear into the jungle, or more likely Poipet, where geriatric generals in wheelchairs will protect them."

  He is full of surprises. "Poipet?" he says with an intake of breath. "You've been there?"

  "Yes. Once." Memory clip: a drab Cambodian town near the Thai border, roughly the same latitude as Angkor Wat. A terrible coarseness everywhere, even in the faces of children, most of whom were prostitutes. I really did see the famous retired KR generals in wheelchairs sucking on tubes attached to oxygen cylinders. "Have you been there yourself, Phra Titanaka?"

  "I ordained there."

  He closes the phone, but the number he was using is recorded on my own. I think he will not answer, but I try anyway.

  "Yes?"

  "At least tell me about Kowlovski."

  "Who?"

  "Her costar in the movie."

  "Ah, yes. The masked man."

  "You worked on him, didn't you? I think you abused powers you had acquired in meditation. You didn't raise a finger, but you killed him by making him kill himself, didn't you? I think that would have been very easy for you. His tiny, shallow, ersatz heart was open to your gaze."

  A long pause, then: "I'll send you the video." He hangs up.

  Chanya has pretended not to listen the conversation, or to see the intensity of my involvement with Phra Titanaka. She serves the pla neung menau in a tureen. The delicately textured fish is cooked perfectly, with not a touch of rawness or dryness, and the lemon sauce balances the natural taste of the fish to produce that wonderful tang on the palate. When we have finished, I pat the Lump, delighted to have the opportunity to play happy family. Our little rented house seems so small, though, and the walls so thin, our existence here so precarious. But it is not outside where the storm rages; it is in my head.

  When we go to bed and make spoons, with Chanya curled up against my stomach, my mind flips back not to the case but to the womb. I reexperience that moment of total panic when we must break out at all costs; perhaps the most primeval of all human memories, and the one that always remains deep down inside us, like a door god at the gates of maya. Without that desperation born of claustrophobia, we would never leave that safest of safe havens; but the memory of those months of oceanic peace ensure we spend our lives trying to get back in. Damrong knew that about men.

  I nod off for a couple of hours, then awaken with a single phrase on my mind: the elephant game. It resonates for anyone who has ever been involved in criminal law, but how can I be sure a simple Cambodian monk is reading from that hymnbook? Surreptitiously I slide out of bed, fish out my cell phone, and go into the yard.

  "The elephant game," I whisper when he picks up the phone. "Tell me about it."

  A sigh. "You don't know? I thought all Thai cops knew about it. The cops built a ball out of thatched bamboo, just big enough for a small human being to be placed inside. My father was not tall, maybe five-four at most, and very slim in a vicious kind of way. There was a hatch
with a lock on the outside. On the day we were taken to the police station, we stood against the wall of a compound at the back. Some grinning cops brought my father out into the yard and made him lie down while they tied him up hands and feet like a hog. Then they slid him through the hatch in the bamboo ball, locked the hatch, and pushed him around the compound for a while, just for some fun before the main event. Then they led a young elephant, maybe eight or nine years old, into the yard and they started to teach the elephant to kick the ball. That's when my father started screaming. He was always so hard-boiled, I was sure he would keep his cool right to the end; after all, he'd wasted plenty of people himself. But he lost it after the elephant's first kick. That made the animal curious. It sniffed around the ball with its trunk and discovered that every time it rolled the ball, the human thing inside would start screaming its head off. The cops thought it was hilarious. Pretty soon the elephant got addicted to football. It kicked to move my father a few feet along, then pushed with its trunk, then kicked. I guess this went on for maybe ten minutes until the ball stuck in a corner of the compound and the elephant lost patience. People don't realize, elephants can have quick tempers. It whacked the ball with its trunk a few times, making a big dent in it; then it started trying to bring its foot down on it. The ball was too big for the elephant at first, but after it made a few more dents with its trunk, the ball collapsed to half its size, and the animal was able to stamp on bits of it. My father was screaming out of control by this time. Then he stopped screaming, but I could see he was still alive. I guess the animal had damaged some part of him that stopped him from screaming. He managed one last howl, though, when it stamped on his lower back. Next thing I knew, there was just a mess of spiky bamboo splinters all mixed up with my father's remains."

  During the long pause I'm trying to think of what to say. It's hard to say nothing, but he's too smart, too mentally advanced, for any normal condolence. He saves me by speaking again: "There's a picture."