by John Burdett
Isn’t it always the way, that when you finally screw your courage to the sticking place, the phone rings? It’s a real ring, not an imaginary one; I can still tell the difference. Blinking rapidly, having been jerked so violently back into the mundane, I grope for the cell phone and manage to press the green glyph as I lay it on the pillow next to my ear.
The caller does not declare himself. He has no need. “What’s happening?”
I let a beat pass. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you forever.”
“When the seeker is ready, the master will come.”
“Have you spent a lot of time in California?”
He chuckles. “See, it’s not as bad as all that, or you wouldn’t be capable of sarcasm.”
“I was expressing disgust. I don’t need Spiritual Quest One-oh-one just now, thanks.”
Another chuckle. “Good, you’re getting stronger. Just tell me what you were doing just now. I’ll tell you what it felt like at my end. It felt like you were dressing up in a suit of armor to get ready to skewer a dragon.”
“I hate the way you’ve perfected telepathy. If it weren’t for that, I could dismiss you as a charlatan in a heartbeat.”
“You can do that if you like. Go ahead, dismiss me as a charlatan. It’s a basic early step. We might have to postpone your enlightenment for this lifetime, but that’s okay. Just make sure you rebirth in a decent body with the right cultural influences. That’s not so easy, of course. The best estimate is a few hundred more screwups in disastrous socioeconomic circumstances before your chance comes around again. And that’s only rebirths in the human form. For the rest, I would choose mammals with short life spans. It’ll save time.”
“Now you’re really sounding like a salesman,” I grumble.
“I told you, I once did my best to join corporate America.”
I sigh. “Just tell me why you called me.”
“Actually, you called me. I tried to contact you on the other side, but you were all closed up with fear. Clairvoyantly, if you must know, you looked like a fetus with its eyes sewn up.”
“I was just about to face my deepest fear.”
He clears his throat. “That’s what I called about. Your courage is noted, but this is not the moment.”
“Why?”
“You’re still too weak, there are too many holes in your subtle bodies-that demon would smash you if you attacked symmetrically. Just relax, let go.”
I exhale slowly. “Look, while you’re on the line, there’s business we need to discuss. A little matter of import and export.”
“This isn’t a business call.” His voice is suddenly smooth as silk, like that of an experienced mother soothing a disturbed child. “Are you still in bed? If so, turn onto your front and place the pillow across your shoulders. Have you done that?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, now I’m going to repeat the mantra to you in a certain tone of voice. You will concentrate on the tone, not the words. Just relax. You may not know it, but you did well tonight. You summoned the courage to face the dragon. That’s good. Now all we need is to train you so you have a chance of winning the bout. Feeling sleepy yet?”
The next time I open my eyes it’s late morning. When I finally get to the station, I find a new e-mail from the FBI:
I got the nerds at Quantico to run a check on your victim, Frank Charles. I was wrong about him emerging unscathed from his divorces. The first two hit him pretty hard, but he was still young and had this amazing capacity to suck money out of the Hollywood system. The third, though, took most of what he had-feminism was in top gear and it was all his fault (it was the Filipina maid while the wife was visiting her mother), so he started looking around for sources of dough. Somebody persuaded him that Nepal had been underexposed in America, and maybe some kind of feature film, or documentary, might be an idea. He went up there for a preliminary reconnoiter, liked what he saw, went up a second time, then something happened that nobody can quite explain. Now, get this. He finds funding for his film. The press releases claim the film is to be about Tibetans fleeing over high passes to Nepal, third-world suffering, dying kids, menfolk tortured in jail, women with newborns having to fend for themselves, frostbite, et cetera-but he never shows it! It’s never released to the public, so it never makes any money, and strangest of all, this man who is such a show-off by nature never shows it privately, either. At least, not that I’ve been able to ascertain, and I’ve spoken to some real knowledgeable film buffs-you know, the kind who remember who was second grip in Gone With the Wind. That’s all for now. Next time you’re gonna Skype me. I can only go for so long in Virginia without needing to look at a genuine foreigner.
Kimberley
Sukum refuses to meet me in Soi Cowboy, so I tell him to wait for me at the Asok Skytrain station. I take the train myself to save time. It’s an education in the healing power of money. Eight years ago if you rode the elevated line, you saw dozens of unfinished buildings doomed to remain skeletal cadavers, uninhabited save by squatters and dogs. That was after the financial disaster of the late nineties. Now the market god has changed his mind and speculation is pushing up steel-and-glass towers again like mushrooms after rain.
Sukum is waiting at the entrance to the station, wearing his usual generic black pants, white shirt, black shoes; he has dared to leave his jacket at the office, however. We take the pedestrian subway under Asok itself and emerge a few paces away from Cowboy. It is one of the oldest red-light districts in the city and was popular with Americans on R amp;R from the Vietnam War. Perhaps the names of the clubs and bars say it all: Suzy Wong’s, Rawhide, Country Road, Fanny’s, Toy Bar, Vixens, Fire House. We start at the British-looking pub on the corner with Soi 23, where an outdoor system of air-conditioning emits wonderful clouds of condensation. The mist splits the light and makes rainbows over our heads as we sit at a table on the street.
Now we’ve done twelve bars in Soi Cowboy, including Fire House, Vixens, Rawhide, and Suzie Wong’s. In other words, I’ve been studiously avoiding the Old Man’s Club, my mother’s bar. It’s about six in the evening, which is not a bad time to be asking questions. Few of the bars are officially open and a lot of the girls have only just gotten up. They are mostly on the street in shorts and T-shirts eating takeaways from the cooked-food stalls which line the soi, all manned by mom-and-pop teams of Isaan clanspeople, frequently from the very villages the girls themselves hail from, so there’s a kind of country-fair atmosphere right in the heart of Krung Thep.
Regarding the Case of the Fat Farang, we’ve had a few hits; in fact, Frank Charles visited all these bars in his time, some of them fairly recently, but he didn’t take any of the girls out, although he paid generously for some intense groping. In the Pussy Cat he allowed himself to be felated in a quiet corner by a team of three professionals who took turns.
“He was a good customer,” the mamasan of the Pussy Cat said, “very polite, paid well, bought me a drink-and the girls said he was a gentleman, the best kind of farang, a pleasure to work with. He paid as much for the blow job as if he had taken them upstairs.”
Out in the street I see Sukum is getting hungry; he’s not quite Isaan himself, hailing from the great plain north of Bangkok, but his village is far enough east for him to have a taste for somtam and sticky rice. I have to say the noodle fritters with tuna and ginger salad look pretty good, so I give in, and we order somtam, tom yam gung, green curry with pork, and five little wicker cartons of sticky rice to take back to the Old Man’s Club, where Nong is presiding. Until recently my mother seemed resigned to the generous lines of skirts and jackets designed for middle-aged female executives, but after watching a biography of Tina Turner she’s gone back to the tight leggings and fashion T-shirts of her working years. She’s looking pretty sexy, I have to say, although there’s no denying the wrinkles as she pulls heavily on a Marlboro Red and takes out her reading glasses to look at Sukum’s photo of Frank Charles.
�
�Sure, he’s been in here,” my mother says. “I had him down as a good prospect so I put Salee on to him. She worked hard, I watched her, and she was really pulling out all the stops, but he wouldn’t take her upstairs. I asked him why not-after all, they were almost doing it right here in the bar, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford her bar fine-and he said, ‘She’s great, but I’m looking for something even wilder.’ Then he left, and I happened to look out onto the street a couple of hours later and who should I see him strolling down the soi arm in arm with but Mad Moi.”
A stunned silence, after which Sukum and I say in unison, “Doctor Mimi Moi, the chemist-cum-pharmacist?”
Nong nods over a sneer of tobacco smoke. “Well, he said he wanted wild, and I guess that’s what he got.”
Suddenly I remember that my mother knows Moi from a short and stormy acquaintance years ago, a brief and ridiculous moment when Doctor Moi decided she would try prostitution for a while-as a sort of reflex of ennui-and intimidated the hell out of the down-market johns who frequent Nong’s bar, without consenting to sleep with any of them. When she wasn’t too stoned to do it with the hairy red-faced middle-aged punters in walking shorts from the Northwest, she was terminally disgusted at the notion of even sitting next to them at the bar. In deference to her social position, Nong waited a whole week before she sacked her.
Now it is my turn to look at Sukum with one of those complacent, tri-umphalist grins-for Sukum, as everyone knows, has made his career on the back of Mad Moi. “Over to you, Detective,” I say, and slip behind the bar to grab a beer. (I have to have at least one a day, on Lek’s instructions.) When I’ve drained the bottle, I hear a bleep on my cell phone. The message is from Manny:
Col. V. ballistic. Get over here.
Feeling the blood drain from my face, I pat Sukum on the shoulder. “If you need any more help, give me a ring.”
“Where are you going?”
I show him the message from Manny.
“Congratulations, Khun Sukum, promotion is within reach, and the case is all yours.”
19
Colonel Vikorn is standing again, but not at the window; he is pressing his back rhythmically and insanely against a wall. He is white as a sheet and suffering from periodic shudders, which in him are a sure sign of homicidal rage.
“That midget general, that toy soldier, that sodomizing fucked-up dinosaur, that spiteful little creep-d’you know what he’s done?”
“No.”
Shuddering so hard he can barely speak, he says, “He’s busted one of ours. Get the fuck over to Immigration at the airport, do something about it. It’s someone called Mary Smith. What the fuck do I pay you a quarter-million baht a fucking month for? You’re supposed to deal with this, not waste your time on some dumb murder you’ve already declined to investigate. Didn’t you explain to Zinna it wasn’t us who busted that Australian woman? Where the hell have you been all morning? I tried to get you on your cell phone, but it’s turned off. Consiglieres do not turn off cell phones-it’s in the movie.”
I do not remind him that cell phones were not invented when Brando and Pacino got together with Coppola thirty years ago. Instead I say, “Yes, sir,” and stride for the door, silently promising myself that whatever the state of the traffic I’m not taking a motorbike all the way to the airport. As I descend the stairs I marvel at the way Vikorn’s rage has displaced the Frank Charles case in my mind. My master’s anger is my business now. When the Old Man gets into one of his psychotic states, the whole station takes on an unhealthy green glow and everyone feels it. Look at it this way:
You are chairman and CEO of an exceptionally profitable commodities business which you have built up from scratch using such talents and opportunities as life offered to improve the hand you were dealt with (apart from an elder brother who is an abbot, every other male member of your family is either an alcoholic or a rice farmer; most are both); you officially left school at fourteen, but in fact you looked after the water buffalo and your younger siblings after the age of eight. Nevertheless, you felt greatness beckon, and your big break came, naturally, via America, in the form of the Indo-Chinese war, particularly in northern Laos, where a certain commodity-named fin in the local tongue, but called opium by your new colleagues-was trading at roughly double the price of gold, thanks to unceasing support from Air America.
Using your war profits as a base, you parlay your way into a commission in the Royal Thai Police and conscientiously build up your business while selflessly serving the public. The way has been long and hard; during tough times many have had to be laid off in circumstances that made survival unlikely; you have to constantly keep your eye on the competition. Nevertheless, your efforts are heroic, inspired, and unceasing: truly a great example of capitalist courage and imagination. By dint of iron control of every aspect of your organization you finally achieve, in late middle age, the kind of dominance over your market and your environment which you so totally lacked in the circumstances of your birth. Your rivals fear you, your people respect you for your benevolence, and there is nothing between you and a yearly doubling of profits for the duration… except that someone has told your bitterest enemy your most important trade secret, which tiny flaw will sink your whole operation and land you in jail for the rest of your life if you don’t do something about it. Someone knows who the mules are.
I am so much a part of the Colonel’s unique rags-to-riches fairy tale that I experience his rage, urgency, and paranoia as if they were mine. It only remains to dash downstairs to pick up Lek, who happens to be standing at my desk with a frown of his own. Before I can tell him we’re off to the airport, he blurts out the source of his anger: “D’you know what Sukum just did? I saw him do it.”
I suppress impatience, for Lek can be stubborn in indignation. “What?”
“He just flipped a case over to you, as if he’s already been promoted and you’re now his slave.” He nods at the monitor on my desk. Sure enough, a file bearing Sukum’s initials has appeared on my own list. Lek is consumed with resentment on my behalf; I calculate it will save time if we do a quick check of the new file, so I double-click on the attachment, which is hardly enlightening.
The report is very brief. It seems that a member of a Japanese trade delegation to Thailand decided to commit suicide in the time-honored Samurai fashion by slitting his guts with a sword, in a three-star hotel on Silom, opposite the Hindu temple. The case summary reports little else, except that the trade delegation in question was comprised of senior members of the Japanese gem industry. Mr. Suzuki was in his early fifties and had recently been wiped out financially by some fraud or swindle, which was one of the subjects on the agenda when the members of the delegation met with medium-level Thai government officials. After the meeting, the delegation returned to Japan-except for the deceased. It seems Mr. Suzuki chose to take his life in Bangkok because he blamed Thailand as the prime cause of his bankruptcy. No further explanation is given.
I shrug. On the one hand, Sukum is clearly in serious breach of protocol in flicking the file over to me without authority; on the other, it is a very minor case which was going to end up untouched at the bottom of someone’s electronic in-box in any event. Does it really matter if it languishes in mine rather than Sukum’s? “He’s just making a point, Lek,” I explain. “He feels eclipsed, upstaged. Let it ride, okay?”
So we’re stuck in a cab, Lek and I, in a traffic jam near the entrance to the highway. There are about a dozen vehicles in front of us and there’s nothing to do but watch the human form reduced to automaton as each driver sticks out a hand with a banknote, the tollbooth clerk in her mask hands back the change, the car moves on. I’m thinking about Tietsin’s termite nest and about being worker number one million and twelve acting out my sub-Orwellian karma and thinking, He’s right, my mind master, this is exactly the continuum we’re stuck with, and for ninety percent of us there really is no way out. Hold that thought for long and you develop a revulsion toward insecticide; I�
��ll never squash another mosquito.
In my extreme boredom I note that my katoey assistant has brought an iced drink with him into the cab; it is based on modified soybeans which glow with a Chernobyl-green hue and are the fuel rods for the experiment in the transparent plastic bag with its rapidly melting ice cubes. Buddha knows what will happen when the thing reaches room temperature. Lek pulls on an extra-large-caliber straw-designed not to block when you suck in the fuel rods-which is transparent save for an orange spiral, so you can see the glowing green beans shoot up the tube into his mouth. When an ice cube blocks his miniature reactor, he switches to blowing instead of sucking, keeping his fist around the top of the bag to save himself from nuclear blowback.
Lek fits precisely with the run-down cab and the kid-not the same one as last week-who arrives with his broken windshield wiper to make a desultory pass across the window, which gesture would certainly morph into a great show of industry and alacrity should any of us in the vehicle look like we’re ready to spring for twenty baht. But we don’t, and it’s four-o’clock hot, which is by no means the same as midday hot, even though the temperature is roughly the same as it was four hours ago. The day itself has curled up with a yawn; it is exhausted, worn-out, dried, clogged with untold tons of carbon monoxide and human frustration, so the kid doesn’t try for more than thirty seconds before retreating into the shade of a pillar on the corner, not even attempting to extract money from any of the other thousands of stationary metal boxes pumping out pollution. It’s just too hot to be hungry.
“Why the airport?” Lek wants to know. He’s finished his drink and is looking around for somewhere to dump the empty bag. He settles for a flat space on top of the driveshaft casing.
I tell him, “One of our mules got busted by General Zinna,” but I don’t mention the Tibetan connection.
Lek whistles. There’s a lot about Colonel Vikorn’s operation he doesn’t know, but there is one rule everyone knows: don’t mess with the mules. Over the years, Vikorn has managed to attract the best kind of carriers: middle-ranking business executives in need of a small pile to regulate a tax problem, respectable farang housewives with kids who see a way to get funding for a house improvement they’ve been longing for (that new veranda-or do you call them patios?-could be yours for just twelve hours of heart-stopping excitement beginning at an international airport near you); and, best of all, business travelers in their sixties or older (successful aging hippies, for the most part) who always fly first-class and are never searched and who carry junk just for the thrill and greed of it. And the reason the Colonel has been able to attract such quality is the same reason other successful enterprises are able to attract the finest in human resources: reliability and high pay. Sure, the sales force is augmented by lower-quality foot soldiers, but they are kept at arm’s length, and even then they are given protection and security way above anything Vikorn’s rivals provide. For that reason the busting of Smith is an image-control emergency as well as a deep wound inflicted by Zinna, and it will have to be avenged sooner or later.