“Waew went to meet the arresting officer and talk to the hippy couple. They made a deal. They would implicate the influential figure and give evidence against him in return for charges being dropped against them. Waew arranged a place for them to stay, what we would now refer to as a safe house, and they arrested the figure. Waew had his case, open and shut. They just awaited the trial date. Then, two days before the trial, the witnesses disappeared.”
“They got cold feet?”
“Not according to Waew. He said there were signs of a struggle and there were personal belongings and money left behind. All the things they would have taken if they’d just done a runner.”
“Who knew about the safe house?”
“Waew and his boss.”
“Ahh. So do we assume the influential figure found an ally at the police department after all?”
“No question about it. The case was dropped. Waew was demoted to captain, and the major general started driving round in a brand-new Saab.”
“And our hippies?”
“Nobody saw hide nor hair of them again.”
“So there’s every possibility the couple we found under Old Mel’s land were the missing witnesses. They buried the hippies and the evidence in one foul swoop.”
“Sounds logical.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any way we’d be able to catch up with the influential figure?”
“That wouldn’t be any problem at all.”
“It wouldn’t? Why not?”
“Does the name Sugit Suttirat mean anything to you?” It didn’t. “He was briefly the Minister for the Environment and then Rural Affairs in two, just as brief, governments in the late eighties. Long enough to make his fortune. He’s now the national chairman of the Awuso Foundation. He’s got a big house and an office right there in Lang Suan.”
♦
After Granddad Jah had left I sat and watched the sea for a while. It was silver and languid like a lake of snot. There was a wall of weather on the horizon, a dark blue line like ranks of special effect ores about to invade our Minas Tirith. It didn’t do a thing to assuage my feeling that it was me against them. The last archer on the battlement. It was all there embedded in the system: get rich whatever way you can, use the money to get power, get richer. And there were no public outcryings because your average man in the paddy envied them their success. Those middle class yellow-shirted idealists playing ping-pong in our assembly building weren’t going to change anything apart from the flower arrangements around the fountain.
Eleven
“I’m not really the type to wander off and sit down and go through deep wrestling with my soul.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, AS QUOTED IN VANITY FAIR, OCTOBER 2000
I sat on a stool in front of Maprao Awnings, the shop belonging to the private detective, Meng. It was humiliating. He had a client. His wife had placed the stool in shadow and given me a cool pack of 30% fruit juice but I was still visible from the road. I’d been in a funk since Granddad Jah’s story. I’d completely forgotten to make lunch so Chompu had driven back to Pak Nam and the family had been forced to make do with dom yam-flavored instant noodles with a side plate of dried squid. I couldn’t eat. I sat and watched them and wondered why I’d been so keen to beam myself back into the ugly twenty-first century. Once I could no longer stand watching them tuck into the fast food with the same relish they attacked my meals, I jumped on the auntie bike and set off for the plastic awning shop. I could have walked. It was only three hundred meters. But I felt I needed to be traveling at speed to get past Ed who was still there at the concrete table.
“Koon Jimm…?” I heard over my shoulder.
“Not now, Ed.”
What kind of man, I ask you, given the current economic turndown, would have two and a half hours to waste in the middle of the day? An unemployed loser, that’s who.
But now I wish I’d walked because a stroll in the midday heat would have been preferable to being eyed by every motorcycle and truck that passed along our village’s one road. At last I heard voices emerging from the shop, and Auntie Summorn, the mother of Maprao’s only known villain, Daeng, was thanking the detective and walking with him to the roadside.
“That makes me feel much more comfortable,” I heard her say, and I didn’t get the feeling she was talking about awnings. A truck that was neither a taxi nor the vehicle of an abductor of elderly people stopped beside her and swept her off. That happens a lot down here. You go for a stroll and everyone stops to give you a ride. Annoying in a lovable kind of way, I suppose. The detective turned to me. If you already have an image of a private detective in your mind, you’ll need to delete it and start again. Koon Meng was about my height but skinny as an ink line. I was surprised he could stand up under the weight of his clothes. I assumed it was the pen in his shirt front pocket that gave him his stoop. He had a five hair mustache and long gray hair tied in a ponytail.
“Sorry to have kept you,” he said. “It’s getting to the stage that I could use a waiting room.”
He laughed with only his bottom teeth which I thought was impossible.
“Nice to see the detecting business is doing so well,” I said with a thick smattering of irony I didn’t expect him to get.
We walked to his office which was merely the front room of his single-story house with a desk off to one side. I sat. He sat.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I want to know what service you’re performing for my mother and how much you intend to charge her for it,” I said.
I hoped he wouldn’t ask me if I’d posed this question to Mair because then I’d have to admit I hadn’t, not directly, which would make it look like I didn’t communicate with my own mother. And then, as I’d been sitting on his humiliating little stool I’d wondered how I might react if he cited the problem of detective-client confidentiality, at which juncture I’d point out that he was a plastic awnings installer and, as far as I knew, there was nothing in the Awnings Code of Honor that covered such ethical dilemmas. But he didn’t give me a chance to use any of my smart-arsed retorts.
“I’m chasing up some poison for her,” he said.
All right. I gave him points for honesty.
“And how would you go about that?”
“Take a sample to the lab in Chumphon.”
“A sample of what?”
“Stomach contents. From your poisoned dog.”
“And where did you…? Oh, yuck.”
The plastic container in the freezer flashed into my mind. Surely she didn’t…She couldn’t have. I shook the thought from my head like a dog shaking off a bath.
“And what did you discover?”
“Lannate 90.”
“And that is?”
“A common pest control. It was considered too toxic for use as an insecticide but it’s still available. A nasty way to go, I’d imagine. A lot of restaurants and resorts use it to keep down the stray dog population. They don’t like dogs worrying customers. They mix it with scraps and leave it out front overnight.”
“And this poison has the ability to distinguish between stray dogs and dogs in collars with their telephone number printed on them?”
“No. Kills em all.”
“But the only resort or restaurant for five kilometers is ours.”
“Right.”
“And we didn’t…”
“Right.”
“So, was that the end of your involvement in this case?”
“No.”
“What else are you doing?”
“Your mother wanted to know the strength and effects of Lannate 90 and who’d have access to it. I told her anyone can buy it but most people with plantations or orchards would have it handy. But that’s most of the population of Maprao.”
“And that was it?”
“Almost.”
“Almost?”
He twirled a plastic curtain ring around his little ringer. I glared.
“She asked me to b
uy some for her.”
“What? How much, exactly?”
“Twenty bags.”
♦
I decided not to ride back home right away. I needed a break from intrigue. My mind was out of practice. The nearest thing to a crime I’d experienced since we dropped down here was the kidnapping of our brand-new red garbage bin from the front of the shop one night in April. The case hadn’t even made it as far as the police station. The neighborhood council had been so devastated that they’d set up a vigilante team. Bless them, they’d found the bin at a small peripatetic fishing community of north-easterners who were using it to ice their catches. The head of our council fined them in lieu of arrest, our bin was returned and we had free squid for a month. It had been an impressive display of local support but hardly front page Thai Rat news.
Now, my out-of-shape intellect was having to juggle buried hippies and stabbed abbots and battered policemen, and grand television larceny…and crazy, revenge-seeking mothers. All this on top of my cooking, gardening, and chicken feeding duties. I parked the bicycle out of view from the road under a sprawling deer’s ears tree and sat on a block of polystyrene. In the monsoons, the Gulf spewed up so much of the stuff, some mornings the beach looked like the frozen coastline of Alaska. But we can all rest assured that, thanks to man’s inventiveness, that same indestructible polystyrene will be washed up on other beaches for many decades to come. Why did I always get distracted by issues when there was a life to live here?
I needed that moment. I’d seen it often in the cinema. The weathered old cop, mired in a case of unspeakable horror, drops everything and takes his rifle and his case files off to a cabin deep in the woods where nature has lain unchanged for thousands of years. And after emerging from a week-long affair with a case of rye, the answer comes to him. “It was the twin brother suffering from amnesia that done it.” That was the moment of clarity I craved. I called to the trees, to the ferns, to the god of polystyrene for an answer. The cell phone in my back pocket rang. I was impressed. Mother nature had gone high tech. I pressed the green phone icon.
“Jimm speaking.”
“Hello, little sister.”
“Sissi?”
“Wachadoin?”
“I’m in a jungle retreat cut off from all forms of communication.”
“All right then. I won’t keep you long. I’ve been reading the personal e-mails of a number of senior members of the Sangka.”
“Do you feel okay about that?”
“I checked. There’s nothing about hacking in the precepts. It doesn’t count as a sin.”
“Then tell me all.”
“Your abbot, the live one, he’s got a relative in high places.”
“Well, that might explain the media blackout. Would this relative be a leading light in the current board games in Bangkok by any chance?”
“Right up there between the bishop and the rook.”
“OK. So it would be very helpful if this relative in saffron wasn’t accused of stabbing another monk to death at this particular time.”
“Any other time and nobody would say a thing.”
“I get it.”
“It would be very, very convenient if the investigators could produce another suspect in a hurry.”
“Would a nun do?”
“Ah, so your mind’s already there. There’s been some research commissioned on your nun. An agency was hired to dig for dirt.”
“I’m not sure I really want to hear this.”
“She was a singer.”
Lot of implications there.
“Nightclub?”
“No. Molum. Thai country. Quite a following, evidently. Then one day she shook off the spotlights and announced she was leaving the profession. The record people tried to sue her, but she was outta there.”
“Did she give a reason?”
“Nope. And six months later she was hairless and didn’t have to worry about the colors running in her washing machine anymore.”
“When was that?”
“Thirty-two years ago.”
“She’s been a nun for thirty-two years?”
“In fourteen different provinces.”
“Ooh, that’s a lot of walking.”
“It is. But, at this point, let me take you back to a time when Sister Bia was just flat-chested Nong Bia, a high-school student in a little village in Burirum. In her class was a young fellow called Kem.”
“Abbot Kem?”
“Don’t spoil the story.”
“They’re about the same age? I don’t believe it. He looks twenty years older.”
“It appears he picked up the odd skin-ravaging disease during a prolonged stay in the jungle. But you’re pushing me ahead of myself. Kem wasn’t the most handsome boy in the class even before the leprosy. But he was sincere and honest. He obviously had something the other boys didn’t have because Bia spent a lot of time with him. There were those who speculated that these two might even get married. But on the final graduation night, when all the other couples were rushing off into the bushes to celebrate their arrival at adulthood, Kem announced that he was entering Thamathiraram temple and would be ordained as a monk.
“Imagine her surprise. She continues to sing with her family troupe and soon makes a name for herself. But, whenever she’s in Burirum, she visits her old flame at the temple. She becomes famous for a love song she wrote herself called, ‘My Love Is Draped in Saffron’.”
“You’re kidding? I’ve heard it. It’s beautiful.”
“I’m sure. It thrust her into the serious ranks of molum celebrities.”
“Did she wear a hat?”
“What sort of hat?”
“An orange one. A sort of a prop, like Michael Jackson?”
“I didn’t see one. I downloaded pictures of her on stage. I didn’t notice a hat, but I tell you, she was something. You’d have to be one serious monk to turn your back on a babe like that. There were quotes from her manager. He said she was a difficult client because she insisted on regular returns to Burirum in her itinerary. And, on one fateful trip to the temple, Kern’s no longer there. He’s gone on a pilgrimage. For years nobody knows where he is. Bia’s career plummets. She lacks the confidence and motivation to continue and so she makes the astonishing announcement. In her late twenties she becomes a nun and begins her trek from province to province.”
“In search of Kem.”
“Isn’t it sickly?”
I would never have admitted to the tears in my eyes just then and I knew Sissi would keep her mouth shut about hers.
“So, when did they get back together?” I asked with a sniff.
“Four months ago she arrived at Wat Feuang Fa.”
“Any record of them getting together in those interim years?”
“None.”
“Then finally she finds him and refuses to leave and he accepts her as a nun in his temple until the Sangka IA bangs down the door.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?”
“But she said they’d been in touch, letters, phone calls…”
“No evidence of it.”
“And what did the council make of the murder and all?”
“That the Bangkok monk arrived in Maprao and told the nun she’d have to leave. That she’d been searching for her love for over thirty years and she wasn’t going to go without a fight.”
“So she hacks him to death with a carving knife?”
“That’s the way they’re seeing it.”
“It’s all wrong.”
“It may be but that’s the version they’ll be passing along to the police.”
I’d looked at the photographs. I didn’t see it as the work of a broken-hearted woman. It was premeditated, cool, not hot blooded. It was no crime of passion.
“Sissi, there’s something wrong here.”
“Perhaps, but don’t you think it would make a fabulous movie?”
I thought about it.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“I c
ould play the lead.”
“The abbot?”
A silence gushed out of the end of the phone in a scolding blast. I sometimes forgot how hairy was the trigger upon which her finger rested. You’d never know what might cause it to twitch.
“That was a joke,” I said.
Ever-increasing silence. I expected to hear a click and the groan of a dead line.
“Come on, Sis. Laugh!”
“Not funny.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But to make this movie work for Clint…” We both had a burning admiration for Mr. Eastwood – we’d seen all his stuff on pirated DVDs. All right, perhaps we didn’t admire him enough to contribute to his royalties but we did like him. “We can’t send Sister Bia to the chair.”
“It’d be lethal injection.”
“So, what do you want me to do?”
“I’m not sure.”
For the next ten minutes, until my cell battery ran dry, I told my sister about the incident with the camera and described the photographs. I think she got most of it. When I stood up, the polystyrene stuck to my backside like a saddle. I don’t know whether it was as a result of the heat I exude down there or some natural latex dripping from the tree but it took me five minutes to disengage myself. It wouldn’t have been fitting for me to go and visit a former Minister for the Environment with a block of foam stuck to my rear end.
♦
The plaque stating that this was the Awuso Foundation National Headquarters was screwed to a solid concrete post beside a fancy fretwork iron gate that towered above me. The two-story house beyond was an iced wedding cake with Roman pillars and strawberry trimming. I dabbed at the gate with a damp finger in case it was electrified. The glass shards topping the four-meter wall had alerted me to the possibility, but my finger wasn’t shriveled to a sausage stub. I put more effort into the gate and discovered that the big fancy beast rolled effortlessly on rubber wheels. It was so well oiled, in fact, that it didn’t stop rolling and I had to run to catch up with it before it crashed into an ornate flower bed.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 18