Somkiet’s two years at high school were probably miserable. He loved to study. He was smart and could have turned his hand to anything. But he was one of a small gaggle of what they call grateuys at his school, whose hobby was to mince around the yard, squeal loudly and do their nails during maths. There were no escape clauses, no crossovers. You had to be either one or the other: a serious student or a fairy. If peer pressure hadn’t been so great, and faculty expectations so meager, Somkiet could have found his way into any university in the country. But those were confusing times. Boys who wanted to be girls had nothing to offer society beyond prostitution and lip-sync cabarets, so the latter was the road he traveled.
Before his high school graduation, Somkiet ran away from home. Actually, Mair packed him lunch and gave him a brown paper bag full of money. She no longer knew how to reason with him so she became an ally. I think at the back of her mind she believed her son would ‘get over it’ and become one of us again. Somkiet changed his name to Sissi and worked his way up through the transvestite cabaret ranks: pot man, waiter, back-row male lip-sync chorus, male dancer, back-row female lip-sync chorus, front-row dancer, specialist dancer, and, at last, every young boy’s dream – specialist lip-sync female lead. And it was there that the glamor began to wrap itself around his/her life. The regulars flashing their eyebrows and their wallets in the front row. The busy secretaries passing on the name cards of their businessmen bosses who’d like a fling – fee not negotiable.
But still Sissi’s star continued to soar. Now began the beauty pageants: Miss David’s Cabaret, Miss Transworld Bangkok, Miss Tran Pan Asia, all the way to Miss San Francisco Pride, all expenses paid, first runner-up. From this to spreads in straight magazines and fashion shows and advertising contracts, even a brief appearance on a television drama. Serious offers from government officials and military officers and film stars to be set up as a minor wife in her own luxury condominium. She was a sex symbol and everyone wanted her.
And then, at last, love.
An architect. A German called Walter. He courted her, followed her around, not stalking exactly, more romantic perseverance. And, most important of all in Sissi’s mind, he wasn’t gay. He didn’t want her as a man in a dress. He wanted her as a woman and he had an unlimited budget to make it happen. No more weird sex tourists and perverts for Sissi. This was a ‘normal’ relationship.
I remember the day Sissi arrived at the shop looking like Marilyn Monroe with her hair permed into a platinum bouffant and heels as tall as oil platforms. She had a real diamond on her ring finger. A Benz with a driver was parked opposite on our small street, blocking traffic and not caring. I ran to meet my new sister, stubby me with my Bermuda shorts and unruly hair and sleepy dust still caked around my eyes. We hugged until the rhinestones on her jacket started to gouge into my bra-less chest.
“I’ve come directly from the hospital,” she told me.
“Are you sick?” I asked.
“No. I’m one of you now.”
For a wedding present, Walter had bought Sissi the gender she’d dreamed of. I screamed with delight and we danced around the shop and she air-kissed Mair who’d remained smiling behind the counter, and she went back to her limo and was gone. I wondered why Mair had taken it all so calmly but learned soon after that she and Sissi had engaged in numerous telephone consultations leading up to the big snip. It takes a special mother to talk her son through the stratagem involved in becoming a woman.
That day was significant for me too. Once Sissi had pulled away I went back to my room, her old room, and I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and I phoned Yot and told him I’d changed my mind and I’d marry him after all.
Yot was a friend who was desperate to be married to anyone, which wasn’t a great premise for a life together. Marriage to him was those paint advertisements. The dopily smiling couple in chinos and matching Lacoste. Two slightly overweight but comatose children, all sitting together on the overstuffed white leather couch. Iggy the lovable pedigree golden retriever holding back his drool for the photograph. A genuine Navajo throw rug made in Phuket. A large pot that real children and a real dog would have destroyed in seconds. Spring sunrise and clotted-cream walls inside a house that looked exactly like the one on the front of the brochure. A neighborhood of well-adjusted couples who wave and say good morning and never fart or vomit gin cocktails into the trash can at three in the afternoon because they were too drunk to make it to the bathroom.
I didn’t even have any keepsakes at the end of my 3.7-year marriage to Yot the Siam Commercial Bank teller. We made no kiddies, entranced or otherwise, because I didn’t want any. Who’d risk children when there are strangers with soundproof cellars driving around in panel vans? He thought he’d talk me out of that one but it wasn’t open for negotiation. He thought he’d talk me out of work, too, and have me standing beside his cooked dinner in my pinafore when he came home from a hard day of bare-handling the banknotes of people with skin diseases and disgusting habits. He thought he’d coax me into feminine dresses and long tong-curled hairstyles. Call me slow, but it took me a while to realize he’d married the wrong person. He’d had her in his mind all along and he believed it was just a question of breaking me in, getting me used to the nip of her high-heeled shoes.
Once he realized his blunder I suppose he didn’t have any choice but to re-advertise the post. He lied about the affairs. There were four that I knew of. I was disappointed about the first affair and for perhaps three months into the second. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t thrown into a whirlpool of misery and I didn’t really care. I had a nice house to come home to and cable TV and a washing machine and dryer. What did I need a husband for? All I had to do was pretend to myself that I was living alone. I loved my job. I had my family to visit. I needed Yot to come home one day and say, “Jimm, I’m leaving you for a long-haired girl who wears dresses.” Then it would have been perfect. But he didn’t ever say it and he continued to share my house. I got tired of having him in my life. When I walked out I wasn’t making a stand, it wasn’t a statement; I’d just burrowed down to my threshold. He didn’t put up much of a fight to keep me.
How did this get around to me?
We didn’t hear from Sissi again until eight years ago when she turned up on the doorstep of Mair’s shop and asked if she could have her old room back. I was shocked at the difference time had made. She was looking every bit the twenty-eight-year-old ex-beauty queen. Her baggy clothes couldn’t disguise the fact she’d put on a lot of baggage and not even cement-thick make-up could tighten up the droop in her face. She’d let herself go and gave no impression she’d be chasing after herself any time soon. She also had no intention of telling anybody what had happened to her life.
I was still tinkering with my marriage at the time and living in my husband’s home so her old room was free. She moved into it with her overnight bag and her computer and there began her self-imposed exile. The only consolation was that you can’t have two recluses in the same house, there’s a regulation or something, so Mair broke out of her cocoon and started to breathe again. It was a great load off her mind and I often wonder whether that escaping load might just have contained fragments of her sanity.
It was at this time that Sissi began putting down the first few bricks of her Internet empire. She purloined the wireless Internet signal from the condominium next door and began a sedentary career at the low end of the World Wide Web pecking order. Apart from teaching herself the mechanics of this awesome network she started to pick up odd jobs: marketing, translating, editing. And eight years later she was already the George Soros of dodgy Internet business. Cyber-fiddles had made her a lot of money. I tried not to ask too many details because I didn’t like the idea of lying in court. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. But I’d picked up hints about scams she was particularly proud of. For example, she had a knack for hijacking other people’s porn sites and making them her own for a month or two. That was a big earner. I think
she might have dabbled in Nigerian bank scams for a while and, of course, who hasn’t been involved in identity theft? I believe it was hacking that gave her the most pleasure. She could break into a site, clear it out in seconds and use the information to commit audacious crimes even before the site owner was out of bed the next morning.
There were days when I asked myself how I could dedicate my life to solving crimes and apprehending villains yet do nothing to bring Sissi to justice. And the answer came to me one evening when I was playing Grand Theft Auto III with her. Why, I wondered, was I getting so much joy from blasting innocent old ladies with a sawn-off shotgun? Of course it was obvious: because it wasn’t real. The world in which Sissi perpetrated her crimes didn’t exist. The online banks she robbed had no bricks or mortar or pens on strings; the charities she made up were never there to begin with. Even the identities she stole were fictitious. Nobody was born with a name or address or Social Security number. They were all artificial add-ons. So, who cared if someone borrowed them? It was like kidnapping Winnie the Pooh off the street, locking him in a cold, wet cellar, slicing off little bits of him and sending them in manila envelopes to the police. You know what? They wouldn’t care. He’s fiction. “Go for it,” they’d say.
That’s how I justify Sissi’s career to myself. Her success in the cyberworld meant she had no need whatsoever for the actual, tree-dotted world beyond her walls. After dark she might have squeezed through the gate of the university and done a little power walking but she was too ashamed of her looks to go out in public in daylight. Her looks, I might add, were far from frightening. Once she’d abandoned the demon drink and started to eat Mair’s nutritious but tasteless food, her old ruddy complexion began to break through the crust. Granddad Jah set her up a little exercise station in the backyard with a stationary bicycle and a fold-up yoga mat. She was looking better and starting to feel good about herself. She’d done one or two heavily disguised forays to Tops supermarket and even attempted a daylight stroll around the campus. And I think that’s why Mair’s act of treachery hit her so hard.
She was back in her shell now, a small dark condominium bedsit shell. She ordered in meals, had a young girl assistant who ran errands for her, and she disappeared completely inside her computer. I was one of her few links to reality so you can imagine how disappointing my regular reports from the bush had been to her so far.
“Hey, Sissi.”
“Wassup?”
Oh, I forgot to mention, Sissi and I throw large helpings of English into our conversations. If we were more confident we’d probably forgo Thai completely. This stew is our sort of private language. English is what they speak inside her computer screen and I get the feeling she doesn’t trust the Thai language anymore, or anyone who speaks it. The staff at her condominium think she’s a Filipina. I, on the other hand, speak English because I had an overseas bridging year between high school and university. I wanted to go to an English-speaking country but they were all full so they sent me to Australia. By the time I’d worked out what they were saying it was time to come home. Mass Communication was my undergraduate major and English my minor. I was halfway through my M.A. in English when Mair sprang her little surprise on me. I speak English with the sort of Thai accent that makes words sound as if they don’t have endings but Sissi understands me perfectly well.
“Nothing much. How’s the Net?” I asked.
“Rocking.”
“How’s Leather?”
Leather was her current online Lothario. They had a stormy frantic sexual monsoon of a relationship on the Internet. In his photos he was a sort of George Clooney in bondage gear. Sissi’s online persona was…Sissi, eighteen years earlier and knee-wobble gorgeous. In her mind that’s how she still was.
“He’s getting a six-inch screw in his scrotum,” she said.
“Impressive.”
“Yeah. How’s the chicken ranch?”
“Two new cocks just started last weekend. They’re on probation. If they haven’t performed by Friday they’re out.”
“How hard can it be?”
“Exactly.”
“Mair?”
“She’s…I think it’s good for her down here. She’s crazy about her dogs and we’ve got the ocean right here and…you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Sissi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got people dying down here.”
“Boredom?”
“No. Murder. Do you think you can help?”
“Bloody oath.”
I’d taught her that. It’s Australian. It means ‘yes’. It was one of the few things I learned down under. I talked Sissi through the VW situation right up to the last visit.
“And I found something, Sissi. This van had a shallow tool chest attached behind the driver’s seat. The tools were still in there. But I found a stash of grass wrapped in plastic. It was taped to keep it dry.”
“Did you smoke it?”
“Forty years on? I don’t think ganja improves with age, Sis.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“OK, but the point is, the water hadn’t got in. There was paper in there, two sheets torn into quarters. I imagine they were using them as papers to smoke the ganja. And they were torn from advertising flyers I’d have to assume were from the company they rented the van from. It was a Thai travel agency called Blissy Travel located in Surat Thani.”
“Phone number?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t long enough. They only had six digits back then. There’s no Blissy Travel in the book now and the post office in Surat told me the address is now a Honda service center. So I’m stuck.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks. And while you’re at it, can you check out a family called Chainawat? They’re the ones who sold the sliver of land to Old Mel. It strikes me as more than a coincidence they’d want to off-load a plot of land with dead bodies on it.”
“Any idea how they got the van in the ground?”
“The police are assuming it was a pit. Dig a big hole. Push the van in. Cover it up.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“No, but only because it doesn’t make sense. I saw the bodies as soon as they were dug out. The skeletons were seated like – all right, they were skeletons – but it was as if they were sitting there enjoying the drive. They weren’t tied or gagged. If you’re about to be dumped into a pit you panic, right? You try to fight your way out. You don’t just sit there and stare out the windscreen clutching the wheel. The girl had her hand on the driver’s thigh, damn it.”
“That’s really poignant.”
“So you get my point?”
“Absolutely. It’s weird. They’d have to die calmly, drugs or gas or something. Probably dead when they were put in the van. Sounds like a very considerate killer.”
“Or a psychopath.”
“Do you know whether they’re foreigners or local?”
“The forensic people didn’t want to hazard a guess. They said their stature was small but they’re waiting for the boss from Bangkok instead of making any wild predictions. Do you think it makes a difference?”
“Sure. If they were Californian they might have just insisted on being buried with their favorite vehicle. They do stuff like that over there. I assume you don’t know how old they were?”
“No, and I imagine we’re out of the loop down here. I don’t think anyone at the forensic lab would tell Pak Nam even if they did find that out.”
“Where there’s a Web there’s a way.”
“You won’t do anything too illegal, will you?”
“If people are foolish enough to wander through darkest cyberspace with their pockets full, they deserve to get mugged. It’s a lawless wasteland out here.”
“And you’re the queen of bandits.”
“You’re too kind. Anything else I can do for you?”
“I’m not sure. You got time for another story?” I told her about the abbot and his nun p
roblem. The more I told her, the more I realized I didn’t have enough background on any of the main characters. I’d have to make another trip over there. I gave her what little information I had and she promised to help. I was hoping she’d be able to tell me why there was a press blackout on the case. I also ordered a copy of the Vinaya Pitaka, the Discipline Basket containing the 227 rules for monks. It outlined the rules and regulations that governed the dharma in Thailand. I didn’t want to have to compete for the printer with the game fiends at our local Internet shop so I asked if Sissi could get her Girl Friday to post it to me. “No problem,” she said.
“Has your PA actually seen you or do you conduct all your business seated behind a red curtain?”
“Now, now. No sarcasm. Kin and I have long chats.”
“And she isn’t repulsed by the horror of you?”
“She’s Burmese.” Burmese weren’t easily repulsed. They needed the money. I was glad my ex-brother had someone to talk to but it worried me that she no longer needed to get any air, polluted or otherwise.
“We all miss you,” I said. “Why don’t you come down and stay with us?”
“Right. Pol Pot’s blog from hell. ‘It’s great. Wish you were here. We could all shovel burning excrement together’.”
I took that as a no.
♦
Mair always insisted, once I’d fed the dogs, I had to take them for a walk along the beach. These are unchained, unfenced feral animals. I tried to argue with her that if they wanted an after-meal stroll to aid digestion, they’d do it with or without me. But she did the eyebrow thing and our morning and evening constitutionals became part of my routine. Me tramping through the soft sand with John throwing herself in front of me expecting constant tummy rubs, and Gogo twenty meters behind pretending she just happened to be walking in that direction anyway. It was a good time for putting ideas together. But on the Monday morning, John didn’t join us.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 7