Number One

by Colin Cotterill

  ‘A few what?’ I asked.

  ‘Photographs.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘This,’ she said, scanning the gathering with the tip of her nose. ‘Thousand baht be enough?’

  It wasn’t the kind of offer I’d have expected from a country woman. A thousand baht was a lot of money. But I couldn’t take advantage of a widow.

  ‘You don’t want to waste your money on this,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I do. It wouldn’t be a waste, I mean. I’d like to have something positive to remember him by. His friends coming by to show their respect, eat our food, drink the last of his booze. It’d be worth it.’

  At that moment in my pathetic, aimless life, I would have stripped naked and wrestled a monitor lizard for a thousand baht. Without a regular salary at the airport, just commissions from the tourists I could hog tie and drag to the company’s rental booth, I was barely drawing even. And the widow seemed to have money.

  ‘Actually I do have a job later tonight,’ I said, not wanting to look too available.

  ‘Twelve hundred,’ said the woman.

  ‘Deal.’

  And thus began my first assignment as a funeral photographer, a vocation which, I discovered, suited me down to and beneath the ground. I took out my Nikon and cruised the event. My objective, I decided, was to capture the good humour of those in attendance yet project an air of mournful respect. I floated almost unseen from table to table as if I were merely that sector of the night responsible for recording events. I found I had a knack for noticing intimate moments such as when Granny Su blasphemed then pressed her hands together in a wai of apology to the corpse. And I felt changes in mood. There was, for example, a sudden drop, a depression when the SUV pulled up in front of the police sign.

  Two men climbed down. One was old, wizened. The other young, brash and Chinese-looking. He was dressed like a bank worker in a crisp white shirt…and a necktie. After what I’d heard, I feared this arrival might spur a riot. But everyone who wasn’t holding a full glass, or a full house, rose from their seats and wai’d the young man as if he were a minister. He wai’d half-heartedly in return and laughed and patted backs and squeezed arms and it was quite evident to me nobody liked him. My first reaction was that this was a shame because he had a very muscular build and fashionable chin stubble. I immediately felt a motherly desire to give him a cuddle and see how far I could poke my tongue down his throat. But, in fairness, I had been throwing back the Saeng Thip sodas as I worked. Stoked by alcohol, my reactions were rarely those of a well-bred Thai woman. My libido often took control in such settings.

  The mood at the funeral party had clearly been sucked down into the earth with his arrival. But whereas the hostility toward the young man was cloaked in prettily coloured hues, the reaction to the old man at his back was black as charcoal. He was dressed like one of them, a well-worn shirt and fisherman’s trousers, but if the looks that passed his way had been razor blades, he would have been sliced to bits and left in stacks for the dogs. So, what were they doing here, this mismatched couple?

  There comes a time when a woman is so filled with mysteries that she either seeks answers or explodes like a stick of dynamite in a jelly fish. Through my viewfinder, I had seen the world lose a dimension. I needed to know why and for that I had to get the alcohol out of my system. I sat at the food table on the vacant stool and sipped a glass of something resembling carbonated seaweed. The other fat lady was serving food to the new arrivals so Beung’s widow and I watched the insincere fawning. The woman spoke without prompting.

  ‘Look at him. Stuck up little twerp. Fresh out of some private university and his daddy’s already got him managing four hundred hectares of prime palm plantation. There’s good fortune for you. He must have suffered something awful in a previous life.’

  ‘Four hundred hectares? That’s a lot of land,’ I said. ‘Where’s the plantation?’

  ‘Right here, Sister. You’re in the middle of it.’

  ‘Here? But I remember most of the land around here being coconut farms.’

  ‘Used to be. Used to be,’ she repeated. ‘We all made a tidy profit with the nuts just like our grandparents and theirs. Low maintenance. Monkey handlers came in once a month. We’d get paid for watching the trees grow. Wouldn’t ever have made us rich but…tidy. You know? Then, all of a sudden, about eighteen months ago, you couldn’t give a coconut away if it had a pink ribbon round it.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘The middlemen told us the bottom had dropped out of the coconut market. Nobody wanted them any more, they said. They wouldn’t even make us an offer. That’s why everyone was suddenly converting to oil palms. That’s where the money was, they said. But none of us had savings. We couldn’t survive those two years while we waited for the saplings to grow big enough to yield fruit. Manure. Insecticide. Sprinklers. We just didn’t have that kind of money. Our men started renting themselves out as day labourers. Not easy I tell you after a lifetime of laziness. We were struggling, Sister. Struggling. Then the neckties arrived.’

  I looked up to see one of the jolly drinkers parading his daughter back and forth in front of the plantation manager as if she were a market cow.

  ‘And they offered to buy up your land,’ I said.

  ‘For cash. They had plastic bags full of the stuff. They were ferrying us back and forth to the land registry office in a mini van and handing over cash when we signed the deeds. When you feel the weight of it in your hands, smell the notes, hear the flutter when you run your thumb over a wad of actual money, you hardly notice that it’s a fifth of what the land’s worth. We’d taken dirt for granted for so long it didn’t occur to us it had a value. None of us had been offered so much money in one lump sum before. Even when the backhoes were knocking over our coconut trees our men were making fancy with their new wealth; drink, TVs, trucks, lucky amulets. Not one of them considered investing it. By the time the oil palms were in the ground and the land was fenced off, the money was all but gone. That’s when we found out we’d been had.’

  I was way ahead of this story.

  ‘The middlemen,’ I said.

  ‘They’d been paid off,’ she spat. ‘The neckties had got to them. “Buy nothing from District 2” they were told. “Show no interest in their coconuts and we’ll make it worth your while.” Don’t know if they ever did make it worth their while. I hope they got ripped off too. But there was no way to prove any of it. The police were already on the payroll. And then, so were we. The only work around here is tending land that used to be ours for minimum wage. The company owns all the shops in the district and the petrol pump and even the company that rented us all this plastic. We have to be nice to them or we starve. We were lucky we were allowed to keep our houses.’

  ‘What about him, the old fellow?’ I asked.

  ‘Him?’ The widow made an effort to spit again on the dirt but her mouth was dry from all the talking. ‘Pop Bounnat. He used to be one of us. Treacherous bastard he is. One minute there he is telling us to hold off, not sell until we got a better price, then he runs off and takes a job as foreman. There are more qualified men…and women for that matter. But he’s there sucking up to the neckties until they decide to take him on. So he gets to keep his little parcel of land ‘cause he’s producing all their fertilizer for them. He’s got cows and pigs. All he has to do is make sure they shit regular. Can you believe that? He’s better off now than he was before they came. He keeps coming around, trying to sweet talk us, but we know a turncoat when we see one. We don’t talk to him.’

  Bung and his co-conspirators sat huddled at their table looking back at the invaders and speaking in hushed and slurred tones. I put on my telephoto lens and took photos from the dinner table. I was fascinated by the expressions on the faces of the new arrivals. The boy looked uncomfortable, as if mixing with such people was below him. But Pop smiled and drank and enjoyed the music with no guilt of his treachery on his weather-worn face. He was clearly a man wi
th no conscience. After no more than thirty minutes, not once noticing me, the necktie looked at his Rolex, made some comment and returned to the SUV. Pop followed him. Someone threw half a glass of stale beer on the old man’s shirt but he laughed it off and climbed into the truck. As the tail lights vanished into the night the good humour seeped back up through the earth and reclaimed the party.

  I was sober by then, if a little queasy from the sugary drinks. Bung was most certainly drunk as an eel. It’s always hard to know what level of stupidity to adopt when speaking to a drunk. I decided to go straight for the kill.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘So that was him, eh? How are we gonna mess him up?’

  Bung leaned in too close, lowered his head, and breathed hot rum fumes down my shirt collar.

  ‘We’re gonna bring ‘em down, darling,’ he slurred. ‘Bring ‘em all down. The whole necktie clan. We’re gonna wipe ‘em out. Get our land back. They’ll be sorry they messed with us.’

  To me it seemed a high ambition for such a small group of incoherent farmers. It was the kind of bomb likely to blow up on the way to the post office. I didn’t want to see them get hurt.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to hire a lawyer?’ I asked despite the fact the profession was renowned for the size and flamboyance of its neckties. ‘I mean, perhaps you can prove they bribed the brokers. Do it all legally. No need to -.’

  Twenty empty bottles jumped into the air when Bung banged his fist on the table.

  ‘Too late, darling,’ he said. ‘We want revenge.’

  Three days later, I had delivered a CD and glossy prints of the ceremony to Beung’s widow. Although the woman seemed indifferent when shuffling through the photographs, she’d handed over the fee in cash. Then, three days later, I received a call from District 9 in Ban Kow where a respected monk was due to be cremated. The abbot had heard from Beung’s widow that I was a most accomplished funeral photographer. Would I be available to document the ceremony? Word has a way of getting around down here in the south. In fact, over the next two months, I was so busy with funerals I completely lost interest in the intrigue in District 2.

  It wasn’t until the second week in May that a headline in the Ban Kow community newsletter jumped at me from the paper: FIRE RAVAGES FOUR-HUNDRED HECTARES OF PALM PLANTATION. No such news had made it to my darling Chumphon Gazette. According to the report, the devastation to the plants was so complete that none were salvageable. It would be at least eighteen months before the land could be replanted. Twelve kilometres of sprinkler system and several cabins on the plantation were destroyed. Two bodies were found in the charred remnants of one wooden shack. I fell back onto my sofa and read, and reread, the report. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like Bung and his cronies had wreaked their revenge after all. But murder? Was that their plan, to do away with the boy and the old man?

  There was a lot in the report that didn’t make any sense at all. The necktie plantation amounted to four hundred hectares. The area burned was almost exactly four hundred hectares. Yet fire had little respect for boundaries. How could it be that none of the village houses on the perimeter of the estate was touched by the fire? No neighbouring farms were damaged by the flames. Not so much as a chicken was roasted. And then again, how could there be a fire at all? The rainy season had begun on schedule in the middle of April. Although not the wettest beginning, there had been several downpours and the land should have been too damp to support such a devastating fire. I wondered whether the police had considered any of this and I was planning to ride back out to District 2 when the detectives came to me. Not local rustics these but serious criminal investigators from Bangkok. The neckties obviously wanted the case solved.

  ‘Is your name Juree?’ asked the younger of the two. They had the look more of fashion models than policemen. I would have accepted advances from either of them. They’d walked in through the open shutters and were standing in my rented shop house in Maprao when I emerged – not looking my best - from the back alcove I used as a dark room. As soon as I could afford to, I’d go digital, but for now I was operating out of an airless, lightless, sweaty room beside the shower recess. If I’d known the fashion police were there banging on my door, I would have emerged wet in a short towel. My legs are fine – disproportionate to the rest of me. As it turned out I was wearing fisherman’s pants and my grandfather’s Fred Flintstone T-shirt. Not the best first impression.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You take pictures at funerals,’ he said. Perhaps it was meant to be a question.

  ‘I know I do,’ I said.

  ‘You took some pictures in District Two a couple of months ago.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we take a look at them?’

  ‘I suppose so…What’s this all about?’

  ‘We’re looking for somebody,’ said the older fashion model. He had a chiseled chin and hadn’t removed his dark glasses. He probably couldn’t see very much in the unlit shop. He was probably guessing where I was standing.

  ‘There don’t appear to be any recent photographs of him,’ he said, ‘so we’d be grateful if we could take a look at yours. Get a copy of one if we could. To be honest, I’ve got a warrant here but I’d like to keep this informal and friendly. All right?’

  I knew I didn’t have any choice and he didn’t have a warrant. Even if he did I wasn’t about to stop him rampaging through my stuff. I had a dozen or so pictures of Bung and his crew. They were saved on the computer. I made a meal of finding them so I’d have a chance to chat with the police. And I suppose I was doing them a favour, after all. Information was the least they could give me in return. The very least.

  ‘This got anything to do with the fire?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you know about a fire?’

  ‘I read the newspaper yesterday,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t make any sense, does it?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you get plenty of fires in the dry season but it’s been raining for three weeks. I can’t understand how it could have caught like it did.’

  The policemen exchanged a glance. The older one nodded.

  ‘The soil was contaminated,’ said the younger.

  ‘Contaminated with what?’ I asked.

  ‘A very volatile mix of wood shavings, alcohol and dried pig manure. Every tree was surrounded by the mixture deep down to the roots.’

  ‘But that would have taken months to…’

  I loved those moments. It was like when you stand in one position looking at rubber trees. There seems to be no order. But you take five steps to the left and there they are lined up in rows, neat, logical. At once, everything makes sense.

  ‘It was in the fertilizer,’ I said.

  ‘It was the fertilizer.’

  I stared at the two men, all the trees neat in their rows.

  ‘You want pictures of the foreman,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Who’d you think we were looking for?’

  ‘No. I …I didn’t have anyone in mind at all,’ I said.

  The funeral photos appeared on an index. I clicked for a larger view and Bung and the drunks appeared full screen.

  ‘That’s the blackmailer, Sir,’ said the younger man. ‘Bung and his gang. I was on the team that interviewed them.’

  ‘Blackmail?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. That’s him. Not much of a blackmailer but he tried. He sent a letter to the boy’s father with compromising photographs of his son with some blond beach bum. Male. Sexual pictures. He was asking for the return of half the land or profit sharing or some such outrageous request and in return he wouldn’t send the pictures to the newspapers.’

  ‘Really? And it didn’t work?’ I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  ‘Seems everyone knew already,’ said the policeman. ‘Times have changed. Being gay isn’t as devastating to the family as it used to be. Nobody gave a shit. The father didn’t want to press charges.’

  I got the feeling this model polic
eman was speaking from personal experience.

  ‘And you don’t think they had anything to do with the fire?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah. No chance of that,’ said the elder. ‘From what I hear, nobody was talking to old Pop the foreman. He planned all this himself.’

  ‘The murders too?’

  ‘He screwed that one up,’ said the older man. ‘The manager and his latest boyfriend had been scheduled to drive up to Bangkok that night. The car wouldn’t start so they had Toyota come by with a tow truck and take it in. The mechanic said they needed twenty-four hours to fix it. So the boys stayed over. They were asleep in the hut on the property when Pop started setting fire to the district. He had no idea they were there.’

  I shook my head. All that time. All that abuse. And old Pop was actually plotting revenge on the bastards who’d stolen their land. He’d scheduled his fire for the rainy season because he knew his explosive fertilizer would burn in any conditions but the neighbours would be safe because their land was waterlogged. And day after day for a year and a half he’d dug in the fertilizer. And then, whoosh!

  ‘And you can’t find the foreman?’ I asked, suppressing a smile.

  ‘He was gone,’ said the policeman. ‘Him and his money. That’s why this photograph would really help. We can put it on the news a couple of times with a reward. Someone’s bound to know where he is.’

  They went through the photos one at a time, very carefully. But there wasn’t one picture of old Pop and the manager. They went through them again and zoomed into the background. Nothing.

  ‘I think it’s because the widow told me she didn’t want to see Pop’s face in her album,’ I said. ‘He was with the manager the whole time so I guess I didn’t take any photos of them. Sorry, fellows.’

  The police thanked me for my time, politely refused my invitation to coffee and cakes, and left in a hurry. The new funeral photographer returned to her computer and clicked a separate file marked Neckties. And there I sat for half an hour clicking through the photographs of old Pop and his accidental victim.