Either way, it was easier to start at this end of the investigation rather than knock on doors in ever-increasing circles around the temple. As it turned out, elimination was a lot simpler than I’d expected. Room occupancy everywhere was down to fifteen percent. Apart from the fact that nobody really wanted to come here in the first place, the downturn in the economy, the cost of petrol, and tourism killed off by the silly unrest in the capital, would have left the majority of the rooms empty anyway. Most of those who’d spent the night had been driving along the main highway, been overcome with fatigue, and pulled into the first place they could find. They’d invariably continued on their journeys early the next morning.
From the hotels I ended up with a sketchy list of two: a salesman called Apirat who was booked into the Radree for the week and someone called Adul who was staying at the Uaynoi Grand and had put his occupation down as ‘tourist’. He had no definite departure date. He was traveling on a very large motorcycle. Nobody with a car or truck matched, or got anywhere close to, the dates I was interested in.
The resorts were even worse. Even the high-end places were virtually empty during the week when very few Thais would consider staying there. I found just the two at the 69 Resort, a short ride from Pak Nam. One was a middle-aged man who’d signed in as Dr. Jiradet, and the other a teenaged girl called Nong Pui on the far side of the compound. They told me the doctor was an adviser for the Pak Nam hospital. There were two foreigners. One was an elderly Korean lady who smiled at everyone, which appeared to be her only method of communication. She’d chosen a room by the busy road rather than the beachfront which made the staff think she might be deaf or demented. Then there was a German man who sat drinking beer on the balcony of his room most of the day. The receptionist had no idea when either was due to check out. I nodded at the German who invited me to join him, I assumed in a little more than a drink, and I quickly exhausted my three words of Korean on the lady.
At five other resorts there were no guests at all, although I was assured there was a good deal of ‘night traffic’ at all of them. I knew what that meant. But the Tiwa Resort, my last port of call, was my best bet of all. A middle-aged Japanese backpacking couple stayed in one of the cheapest rooms and were, according to the staff, living on instant noodles. They’d been their only customers for three days. But then a mysterious Thai guest in room seven had arrived in a very expensive black Benz the day before the killing. He’d retired immediately to the room and ordered room service from their restaurant. My interest had been piqued when the receptionist described him as a hit-man type. It was a fact in Thailand that criminals often went out of their way to dress and look like criminals. It made the job of identification a lot easier.
He’d registered as Ny Wirapon and left all the other boxes in the form empty. He hadn’t yet checked out. I drove slowly past his room. There was somebody inside but the Benz was nowhere to be seen. The only thing that made him an unlikely suspect was the fact he was still there. Why stick around once you’ve made your kill?
The most significant outcome of my inquiries had been an overall feeling of doom for the tourist industry and the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant in particular. If the places of quality couldn’t attract guests, what hope in hell did we have? I took my scaling and gutting buckets and sat beside Granddad Jah. He ignored me, pretending to be more interested in a meter-long monitor lizard ambling along the grass verge. I read that they can grow up to fourteen feet. I’m assured they only eat insects and small rodents but it seems to me, if you’re as big as a truck, you can eat anything you damned well please.
I was on my third mackerel before I spoke.
“I could use some help on another case,” I said, as if into thin air.
“Ask the police,” he said.
“I did. They’re lost.”
“That’s a state they should feel familiar with.”
I mentioned to the hot midday breeze that I’d had a chance to visit the excavation of a VW camper van and went on to describe everything that had resulted from that discovery. By the last fish, I’d arrived at the tail end of the story. He didn’t speak for a very long time and the mackerel was starting to sing off-key in the heat. I was wondering whether the old man had heard me at all. I stood.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat down.
“You’d need to find the original detective,” he said. “The one that investigated the case of the car hire scam.”
“I’ve got his name,” I told him. “It’s Waew. He was a captain. He’s retired now.”
He turned to look at me as if perhaps there was some sliver of hope for me in this world.
“So, find him,” he said.
“I did.”
“And?”
“He won’t talk to me.”
“Get your police on it.”
“He won’t talk to them, either. I believe he said something like, ‘You bunch are just corrupt, evil bastards.’ Then he hung up.”
I wouldn’t have put my life savings on it but Granddad Jah might just have cracked a smile about then. If only I’d had my camera with me.
“He sounds all right,” he said.
“I thought you’d like him. Do you want his address?”
“All right.”
“Lunch in half an hour.”
♦
“Mair. Have we found the sinner in our midst?” I asked. “He that shall be forgiven?”
“Not yet,” she said.
I was in her cabin and we were hand writing brand-new menus for the restaurant. Our resort was officially empty again following the flight, that afternoon, of our bird lady.
“You will tell me when you do, won’t you?” I said. “I’m really interested to know…who it is we aren’t going to do anything vindictive to.”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, absently.
I watched her stick fish transfers on the corners of the menus. My mother. At high school I’d gone through periods of not liking her. But whereas my classmates were not liking their mothers because they were too much of a presence in their lives, I resented mine because of her absences. When she was home it was as if you were plugged into the world. When she was away you’d sit staring at the empty socket: Granny Noi sitting counting and recounting the banknotes in the shop till, Granddad Jah with his vocabulary of grunts.
It was probably because of Mair’s absences that I studied so hard. I wasn’t trying to impress her. I was trying to earn whatever qualification it took for me to be out there with her, her personal assistant carrying her bag of tricks like a wise caddy. By the time I was sixteen I knew what I wanted to be. What better way of reaching the horizon than as a journalist? I read all the newspapers, Thai and English, that we sold in the shop. It was the perfect start. I didn’t have to pay for any. I saw myself interviewing my mother, exploring the mysterious depths of her life. Mair, a special feature. My mother, exposed. And I broke into a metaphorical trot to get through those cumbersome study years so I could be the person outside that I already was inside. And I was running so fast that I almost missed the middle-aged lady I passed ambling in the other direction.
“Mair, is that you?”
She’d run her race. Done her dash. Her bag of tricks was upended and she had no more passion. Even her stories became gray, as if she could no longer see her life in the Technicolor it once was. I was flying out of the missile hatch just as she was docking. Overnight we changed places and once more we’d become unfamiliar. I missed my exciting mother but I learned to love her as a different person. But then, three years ago, she’d started to put her handbag in the washing machine, to walk into my bedroom thinking it was hers, to give customers four five-hundred-baht notes as change for a five-hundred-baht note. Those cracks were few but through them I saw the light of somebody I recalled. She began to surprise us with stories, blurt them out with no rhyme or reason. And her voice would crackle with joy as she recalled a place or an event. There would be gaps like a dream remembe
red upon waking but it made the stories even more mysterious.
When they’d first begun I’d thrilled at those moments and urged her on. But slowly, far too slowly, I came to realize that this was my mother traveling backward on a mechanical walkway, passing through time, past huge placards advertising moments from her life. And I began to fear that one day she’d be so far along that escalator she’d no longer recall where it was she climbed on or who was there to see her off. Now, three years on, the condition was no worse, suspended as if the walkway had broken down and a team of men in blue overalls was underneath trying to get it going. So, sometimes, ever so gently, I dared to nudge her along to another placard. There was one I desperately wanted to see.
“We had another bat fly into the bulb on my porch two nights ago,” I said. “Smashed it completely. But that bat just shook off the glass shards, walked around in confusion, then flew on out of there. It didn’t panic at all. It was like a pet. It made me think of…Thanom.”
Mair smiled. I’d pressed the secret code button and was ready to enter that hidden room where she and my father kept a pet bat.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“You told me. You said you and – ”
“No, I mean, how do you know it walked around in confusion? If it smashed the light it would have been dark. It was cloudy two nights ago.”
“I heard its footsteps in the broken glass.”
“Bats never were ones for walking, you know?”
See what I mean? When my mother wasn’t out of it, she was completely in it. Saner than all of us. The pet bat story would have to come in its own sweet time. I stood to leave.
“On your way out can you remember to put water in John’s bowl?” she said, without looking up. “She’ll be thirsty.”
♦
I phoned Sissi later.
“Sis?”
“Nong.”
“How’s Leather?” I always liked to ask how Leather was because, in his own weird, probably nonexistent way, he was a benchmark of stability in Sissi’s life.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“I deleted him.”
“What did he do?”
“He announced he was coming here on holiday.”
“Oh, that’s terrible. Is it terrible?”
“Of course it is. I don’t want to see what they’re really like.”
“He might have been nice.”
“He calls himself Leather and whips women online. He’s either a factory worker or a bus driver.”
I felt sad. Really. I’d like to see her settle down with a bus driver.
“So, who’s next?” I asked.
“I’m giving up on men for a while.”
This sounded a lot like me in Pak Nam. I told her about Ed and my temporary dip into gaiety.
“Have you ever considered…?” I began.
“Women? No, don’t even joke about it,” she said. “Who would stoop so low. No, little sister, I’m going to be an auntie.”
I had to think about that.
“Wouldn’t that involve either Arny or me doing the business?”
“Ha! I should live so long.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“No, I’m going to be an auntie to thousands, perhaps millions. Do the words Cyber Idol mean anything to you?”
“No, of course they don’t. It’s a very Asian thing. Started in Korea. It’s now even bigger in Japan and it’s slipping south.”
“Does it involve singing and being humiliated by impresarios with limited talent of their own?”
“Not even. This is the ultimate self-makeover site. You have young girls who look like, say…you, and you set up your homepage with photos of what you actually look like. And the site has make-up and hair and – get this – Photoshop advice to do whatever it takes to make you look absolutely stunning online. There are no rules. You can pull any trick in the book to make yourself look like a babe. Then you enter online beauty competitions and the Web audience votes for their favorite and it doesn’t matter that everyone knows you’re a dog underneath. It’s all about what you can do to give the impression that you’re glamorous. And they have the same thing for men: the hair, the zit removal, the corsets and the airbrushing and you end up with these darling Barbies and Kens dating each other on the Web.”
“It sounds sad.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“It’s not real.”
“It’s better than real. It’s totally honest. They all know they’re unattractive but they can live these lives as beautiful people.”
It didn’t sound honest at all.
“How do you fit into this?” I asked.
“I know the geniuses who set up the site. They want me to be their style guru. I’ll be giving advice on how to dress, how to move, how to present themselves on Webcams.”
“Are they paying you?”
“You know how I’ve always wanted to give to charity but I could never find the right one? Well, this is it. I’ll be doing it pro bono.”
“A very worthy cause.”
And an appropriate choice of guru. Auntie Sissi encouraging an entire generation of empty people to pretend to be something they weren’t. The thought of it depressed me. After another twenty minutes I was able to wrestle the subject around to crime.
“Sissi, do you have any moral objections to hacking into the DRA computer banks?”
“That’s the Drug…Rehab…?”
“Department of Religious Affairs.”
“Oh, absolutely not.”
I gave her an update of the Wat Feuang Fa case and told her what I needed to find out.
“Any chance of getting back to me by tomorrow night?” I asked.
“I tell you from experience, religious sites are so easy to hack I know monkeys that could get into their inner sanctums. They all believe they don’t need security ‘cause they’re protected by a Higher firewall. So, it’s all an agnostic’s playground. You want me to leave any mystic symbols to screw their minds up?”
“No, just a simple smash and grab will be fine. Thanks.”
When I hung up it was ten thirty, half an hour after my bedtime. I was just about to step into the shower, then stare forlornly at myself in the full-length mirror when my cell phone rang again. I’d forgotten to turn it off.
“Hello?”
“Little scribe? Are you awake?”
“Chompu? What’s up? Are you lonely?”
“Hardly. I’m surrounded by men in uniform.”
“Are you fantasizing?”
“Er, no. I’m on speaker phone. We were wondering if you could pop down to the station.”
“What? Now?”
“There’s been an incident.”
Ten
“…the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 11, 2001
Arny and I arrived at Pak Nam police station at ten fifty. We had a long-standing arrangement whereby if ever I had to leave home after dark for anything that wasn’t a date (three in the past three years) he’d come with me. He pretends it’s because he’s worried about the truck getting stolen but I know if he didn’t come he’d stay awake all night worrying about me. Mair succeeded in making us all weird in our own ways but she also gave us a deep sense of loyalty. We walked up to reception and a sergeant, slightly crooked like a bamboo root, was sitting on a stool behind the counter. I’d never seen him before. He looked nervous.
“I’m – ” I began, but he waved us through without saying anything.
There were police everywhere that I didn’t recognize and I was starting to think the place had changed hands in a coup, but then I saw Constable Ma Dum hurry out of the meeting room. I called to him.
“In there,” he said, looking twice at my bodyguard.
We walked into a room that was crowded but not active. It was like half-time at a sporting event when the team was being thrash
ed to within an inch of its life. A few mumbled conversations ceased and all heads turned to look in our direction. I recognized the two detectives we’d seen at Wat Feuang Fa. Major Mana was there and Chompu and a dozen men in uniform, most of whom I didn’t know.
“Well, this is an interesting turn of events,” said the taller of the two detectives. His hair was stiff and spiked like the bristles of a bottlebrush and his face looked as moistureless as the skin of a longan fruit. His partner was in poor shape but thought he could also get away with wearing tight jeans and a black T-shirt tucked into his belt. He couldn’t. Both men homed in on Arny who cowered beside the door.
“Manage to pray your way through your loss, did you?” said the paunchy cop.
Of course, they remembered him from the day we’d first visited the temple, but neither of them had seen me that afternoon.
“What brings you here, big man?” asked longan skin.
“He’s with me,” I said, stepping up to the two detectives and offering them my most subservient wai. Neither man bothered to return it.
“This is the reporter,” Mana told them. Chompu stood behind him with his eyes fixed on my brother.
“Interesting,” said the detective. “And what a coincidence. Titan here turns up at Wat Feuang Fa the day after a killing to cry over some imaginary bereavement, and his girlfriend just happens to be interfering in a case that no other reporter in the country knows anything about.”
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 15