Bangkok Haunts sj-3

by John Burdett

  Smith is in a bad way. It is a shame to see that big, attractive farang body in a corner of its cell, curled up in a fetal position. His depression may be terminal, and I wonder if it would not be more humane for me to leave him alone. I press my head against the bars, watching. I see movement in his eyelids and the occasional twitch of a hand or leg. "Khun Smith," I say, "it's me, Detective Jitpleecheep." He blinks and looks up at what must be a single intense shaft of light.

  My face disorients him still further. He cannot be sure it is really me, and if it is me, have I come to save or to gloat? We remain like that for perhaps ten minutes, neither of us sure of what kind of communication may be possible. Eventually he shifts his body, like an animal coming out of hibernation, and manages to stand. Like me, he is reduced to wearing an old sarong, which gives him the aspect of White Man Gone Native: an image from tales of the Raj. The bars impose a grid of vertical black shadows, like a giant bar code. "You," he says, as if I am the source of his misfortune. He approaches the window with the curiosity of a man toward the devil that is tormenting him. "You."

  "I didn't do this," I say. A jerk of his chin points out that I am free and he is not. "Damrong," I explain. The name triggers a shudder. "It is hard for a farang to understand, perhaps impossible." I scratch my head exactly because it has struck me just how difficult it must be for a Westerner to comprehend, even a man who has spent time in the East. "She left instructions." He shakes his head. "She was not afraid of death, in a way had been looking forward to it all her life. Then came the money, you see, Smith, the money."

  He glares in a vulnerable kind of way: defiance that expects defeat. What is it about Asians that makes us feel apologetic toward the West, as if we always knew in our heart of hearts the catastrophe toward which it was headed? Perhaps we should have done more to prevent it? I, at least, feel compelled to try to explain. "Death," I say. "Tom, have you ever thought what it might mean? Never mind religion — I'm talking basic observation. Tom, what she knew is what nine-tenths of humanity also knows: Death trumps money. I'm not talking machines for killing people-that's just Neolithic butchery. I'm talking about Death as an idea, Death as a weapon of the mind, Death as a reality only adults can confront. You were never going to win, Tom. You lost the war the moment you gave her that first lustful stare. While you were thinking about hiring her body, she had a much bigger plan, more holistic." I pause, trying to find the words. I'm not sure if I really mean what I say next, but it seems inevitable that I say it: "Tom, are there any adults at all where you come from?"

  I have failed to get through to him, of course. Now he's certain I'm just an unhinged half-caste, a kind of Oriental gargoyle sent by some barbaric power to torment him. I give up, feeling bad.

  Khun Tanakan has heard our conversation and come to his window in the cell next door.

  "How much?" he hisses. "Just tell me how much you want." Even in such a short sentence, his exalted level in our culture, his familiarity with the highest echelons, his sophistication, and his innate toughness are implied in every syllable. His Thai is so much more elegant than mine I am almost tempted to speak English.

  "It is not up to me," I say.

  "Vikorn? Is Vikorn behind this?"

  "No," I say. "It's the girl herself."

  "What are you talking about? The girl's dead."

  "Only in a manner of speaking. You might say her will is very much alive." He glares. "It was mostly your money, wasn't it, that financed the project? You handed over the million-plus for her services, less whatever minor investment Smith made. Of course, you knew you needed an aide-de-camp, a fall guy, a consigliere, for you could not afford to get too close to the scam itself. And of course, there was always going to be a need for enforcement: Khun Kosana, your fatally indiscreet slave-buddy, with his lover Pi-Oon. If not for that, I think you would have had Smith killed just because she used him to make you jealous. He is after all taller, younger, stronger, and Caucasian. Yes, certainly, you would have killed him as a casual reflex of power, so to speak: Nok. How Damrong must have insulted you, how she must have poisoned your days and nights for months on end for you to even think of doing anything so reckless as to invest in that snuff movie. Can you admit that you loved her?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Yes, with you I can use that word. Strange, isn't it? You are so much harder, so much tougher than your accomplice Smith, and yet with you that word comes to mind. She was, after all, your total and complete opposite-dare I suggest your other half? You in the penthouse, she in the gutter. She twisted a knife in your heart by telling you all about Smith, the handsome, phallic farang whose cock was so much bigger than yours. She was an expert at injecting acid into your veins just when you thought you were winning. Am I right?"

  "Go on."

  "Lust is blind to class. What drove you out of your mind was her total and intimate understanding of that reptilian side of you. She knew where your ambition came from. It came from a kind of hatred of life-exactly the same impulse that drove her. You got rich out of revenge on life. So did she, in the end. And then there was always your mother. At the end of the day, only a whore could really turn you on."

  His eyes pierce like needles. "Bring on the elephant. Get it over with."

  He retreats to a corner of his cell where light does not reach.

  "Ah, no one doubts that you are harder than steel, Khun Tanakan. All who know you would agree. But think about this. If she is able to reach you at will, night after night, and rape you dry even while you are in the body, what chance will you have on the other side?" Chinese are even more ferociously superstitious than we are. I observe a twitch in his right hand, then a shudder as he turns to the wall.

  Over in a corner of the compound the Khmer have gone back to work on the first of the bamboo spheres. It's taking shape but is still very wobbly. After an hour or so they give up. Too hot. There is no hurry. The show won't begin today, or even tomorrow.

  35

  The first you see of dawn is blood in the eastern treetops and a universal glowering heralding another unbearable day. Twenty minutes later the sky starts to blind while it boils, and you do everything in your power to get out of the way. The sun itself is usually invisible behind a pulsating screen of humidity, so that the whole sky seems to radiate an unhealthy intensity of light and heat. I awaken early, before first light, wash myself down at a stone trough outside my hut, and wrap my sarong around me.

  My body still wet, my sarong soaked, I make up my mind to climb the stairs to Gamon's hut. I decide not to knock but press the door. It opens, and I step over the threshold. I guess he could not be dead and still be in a semilotus position, but the vital signs are few. I step over to him where he meditates with his back against a wall under a window. I think I am about to shake him, but the Buddha directs differently. I caress his beautiful face and kiss him gently on the forehead. "Phra Titanaka, my brother," I whisper.

  He opens his eyes in another universe. He smiles with the generosity of one who has dumped ego and accepts eagerly the love in my eyes; then he remembers, and the anguish takes over.

  "Gamon," I say, "we're going to have to let them go. Baker is dead because of us, but it was not really our fault. We don't have a lot of bad karma arising from his death. But if we go through with Damrong's plan, what will become of us? We'll be locked in granite for a million years."

  Horror in his eyes: "And if I don't obey her? Have you any idea the power she has? She visits me every night. I still have sex with her."

  "Because you let her. You're a Buddhist monk-how can you allow yourself to be enslaved?"

  My words startle him. He blinks at me then stares at his robes. "Of course, I'm so used to these, I've forgotten I no longer have the right to them."

  In his disoriented state his childlike response is to stand and disrobe in front of me. This is not the effect I expected, and I want to tell him to put them on again, but as he stands in a pair of boxer shorts with the heap of saffron cloth
at his feet, I watch a fascinating transformation. The monklike comportment quite melts away in less than a minute, together with the personality that went with it. That other side of him emerges: harder, more primitive, more built for survival, more criminal. I see clearly now the young man who once smoked and traded yaa baa. His voice is stronger, hoarser. He goes to the single window of his hut to look down on the compound where his elephant assassins graze.

  I say, "Gamon."

  He sighs. "There is more."

  "Tell me. It might save someone's life."

  Controlling his tone: "Her last e-mail didn't tell the whole story. It didn't tell the story at all."

  I think he wants to turn his face to me but cannot. I have him in profile while light starts to bleach the compound. "Things she didn't want to remember or think about simply ceased to exist in her mind."

  He summons the courage to face me. "You saw the reference to incest, but you didn't pick up on the significance."

  "Tell me, my friend, while there is still time."

  A groan comes from the heart. "It started just like she said, two frightened kids in a wet and stinking two-room hut, Mum and Dad drinking, smoking yaa baa, and screwing in the next room — partying, you understand — no food for a day or two because they were too far gone. Then when Mum was unconscious and Dad was out of his head, he would call for her. He liked to mix sex with his voodoo. She would go to him, then come back looking like death. Looking like a seventy-year-old fourteen-year-old. But she stopped him from using me. Even then she was using her body to protect me." A long sigh. "But she had her needs too."

  After a pause, he starts again in a stronger voice. "Sure, that's how it started. She showed me what she wanted and how she wanted it done. When I was a little older, she showed me what I wanted and did it for me. That was after her first tour. My first experience of sex was world-class, you might say."

  He coughs. "Nothing wrong with that, apart from some primitive taboo designed to keep the tribal genome healthy, which hardly applies in an age of contraception. People who worry about such things should worry more about how Damrong and I would have turned out without incest."

  A long pause. "But when she came back from her first tour in Singapore, she had changed. She was only eighteen, but she was a woman." Licking his lips: "And a whore. Whores suffer from terminal love starvation-you know that. They screw and they screw and they screw, and not a drop of love comes out of it no matter what they try. A kind of madness takes over them. They must have a real lover, even if he's some ugly, broken-down, old white man — "

  "Or a close family relation."

  He nods. "After every tour she came home panting for me. Usually she would get to Surin and call for me. I would go see her in a hotel. If she'd done well that month, she would rent a five-star suite. She liked showing me the power of her money. She was so hungry for me, it was almost like being raped. But of course, I wanted love too." A couple of beats pass. "She would always spoil me afterward, buy me motorbikes, whatever I wanted. One time she'd made so much, she bought me a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy-we had to sell it a few months later when times got tough. She would say over and over again that our love was the only way, that she couldn't keep on the Game and support me if she didn't have me to come back to." Looking at me curiously: "How did your mother handle it? Did she keep asking you if you really loved her?"

  "We went through that stage." Paris, old Truffaut snoring in his gigantic Belle Epoque bedroom under the silk bedspread, None embarrassed in front of me for going with such an old man: You do love me, Sonchai, don't you? You forgive your mum, darling, don't you?

  "But she never seduced you?"

  "Nong? No. Impossible even to imagine."

  "From the age of fifteen I heard the same words over and over: If you ever leave me, I'll kill myself."

  Light dawns in my skull just as the heat starts to bite, and sweat magically appears all over his brown body. I think: Of course, foolish of me, she would have needed a real lover just to carry on. But he would have had to be a cripple, hobbled. Memory flash: once walking with her on Sukhumvit, hand in hand, insanely happy, I tripped on a manhole cover-a stupidity you commit only when you're in love. I had to limp for a couple of days. I expected Damrong to despise me, but her reaction was opposite to that. She took care of me, urged me to lean on her shoulder, massaged my ankle in the middle of the busy street, showed love while I was helpless, used kindness from her palette of seduction. "I see."

  "Perhaps you don't. She did a tour in Switzerland that lasted eighteen months. She was making so much money, she didn't want to lose her clientele until she felt she'd cleaned up."

  Two beats pass while he brings his heart under control, then: "I was the one who couldn't stand it. I simply couldn't. Without her I was less than half alive. I smoked too much yaa baa, started selling it, got caught. She had to rush home to bribe the cops to get me out of jail."

  A terrible choking takes hold of him. He coughs hoarsely and shakes his head. He points to that short, thin white scar on his left wrist, which precisely replicates the one on his sister's arm. "Childish, third-world melodramatic — but the blood was real. We vowed our lives away to each other. She said she'd never leave me for so long again, I promised to reform, go to some fancy school in Bangkok that she wanted to send me to, learn to speak English — I would be the saved one. When she was totally burned out by her late twenties, I would be able to look after her. Repay the debt: gatdanyu. That's what this case has always been about, Detective. You could call it a Case of Third-World Debt."

  "But you ordained," I say.

  He rubs his eyes. "She did try to make more regular visits, but then the chance came to work in America, and she was greedy. She used some Mafia connections to get a visa. She was away two years that time. I wasn't a teenager anymore, I was in my early twenties. I'd graduated from university with a degree in sociology, of all things. I don't think she realized how useless that was going to be." He looks frankly into my eyes. "I knew I could never work-too fucked up. But I didn't want to betray her by going back to drugs. I did what any young Thai or Khmer man might do. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But the Thai Sangha wouldn't have me because of my criminal record, so I crossed the border to Poipet, the Cambodian gangster town where our parents came from. No worries about criminal convictions there. When I e-mailed my decision to her, she didn't mind at all. She thought I would stay in the robes for a month or so before boredom forced me out. So did I."

  I am staring at him, lost in horror, wonder, and admiration. I say, "Oh."

  "Yes, oh."

  "You found you were a natural."

  "Everyone said so, from the abbot to my meditation master. A reincarnate for sure, they said. This kid has been around for millennia, flirting with Buddhism, never quite taking the final step. I found vipassana so easy, I was able to meditate for a full two hours after only the first week. After a year I could manage a full day and night. I was experiencing freedom and happiness for the first time in my twenty-four years on earth."

  "While she was in the States."

  "Yes."

  "It was easy to believe that the Buddha had intervened and relieved you of all karma, even gatdanyu."

  "Yes. Exactly."

  "But when she came back?"

  He turns again to the window. "She'd been busted for prostitution and running a bawdy house in Fort Lauderdale with her American husband. She didn't give a damn about that, but she was in a rage against American men. According to her, they were either pubescent boys in men's bodies, or total animals. She despised her husband. Two years with not a single emotional event in the life of a young woman, even a woman like her, was hard to take. She'd spent the last twelve months craving me."

  "She wrote to you?"

  "E-mail. In Cambodia the rules are very relaxed. Monks surf the Net all the time — it's not even frowned on."

  My sharp intake of breath sounds like a hiss in that hot little hut. "You were li
ving two lives."

  He nods. "I couldn't tell her by e-mail that I was the real thing, a genuine monk. I didn't have the strength."

  "Then she returned from the U.S."

  "Then she returned," he agrees, with a grunt not totally devoid of humor. "She was boiling with rage that I did not make myself available." He coughs. "You know how Cambodia is. She bribed some monks to look the other way, shaved her hair, dressed in white like a looksit, and sneaked into the monastery." He challenges me with a sudden ironic smile. "Can you imagine? I hadn't had sex for two years. How erotic, her naked body with her head shaved. Silent and furtive in candlelight. Insane." A pause. "Of course, after that night she had won no matter what I did. I tried counting how many precepts I had broken: sex, harboring a woman under the same roof, deception of the abbot, habitual reoffending. She came to see me every night for two weeks, until her next tour."

  "A pattern was established?"

  "Certainly."

  "You could not adapt-that would have been impossible. You had no choice but to divide yourself in half."

  "Whenever she went back to prostitution, I would meditate for twenty-four hours every third day, until my mind had relinquished her. Vipassana works whatever you use it for." He flashes me a dark look. "But for a weak monk, even his successes come to haunt him. In the midst of serenity, demons."

  I stand up to go to the little window and look over his shoulder. The three elephants are grouped together, sniffing the ground where Baker's blood was spilled. When you have been around these animals for a while, you start to notice clues as to their extraordinary intelligence. I have no doubt that some kind of communication is taking place, as if they too are discussing the case. I've come to feel awe at those gigantic, know-all craniums, those probing trunks. They seem to comprehend everything. I guess the jungle is getting to me.

  "But the biggest scar, surely, was the elephant game itself, when the cops killed your father."

  He shrugs. "Not a scar, exactly. An initiation. I was in my early teens. Until then adults, my sister, had belonged to the realm of the gods. When they first rolled the bamboo ball out, I thought it was a game. I grew up in the fifteen minutes that followed. The real revelation was her joy, her incredible enthusiasm with the camera-she'd bought an expensive Minolta with a big black zoom lens. When I started meditating, that was the first, persistent image I had to deal with: not him dying but her with the camera, filming his death. Her glee, her insane cries of triumph. She was all I had, and she'd taken me into her world, which I assumed to be reality-what else?"