“Since when did you get up before sunrise?” I asked her.
“Never,” she said. “I haven’t been to bed. I’ve had rather a heavy night with the police.”
“You in trouble?”
“Not the real police, fool. The Police Beat police. They’re really bullies online too, let me tell you. I have bruises.”
“I believe you.”
I looked down at the beach and saw a shadowy figure trudging along the sand.
“And I found you a hat,” she said. “An orange one.”
“OK, thanks. Mail it down.”
“Look, will you slap yourself in the face or something? You’re always educationally challenged when you first wake up. I’m talking about a case. An unsolved murder.”
“All right. And it’s a stabbing?”
“No.”
“Victim have religious connections?”
“No.”
The little enthusiasm I’d managed to rouse was on its way back to bed.
“Thailand?”
“Guam.”
If you’d handed me a map and offered me a million baht I couldn’t have told you where Guam was. Neither could I give a lizard’s back end.
“So, the connection is an orange hat?”
“Do you think you can downgrade a little of that cynicism? I’ve been up all night looking for this frigging hat.”
I’d unlocked the beast so it was the least I could do to hear her out.
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“Toshi.”
“Bless you.”
“My Japanese detective. A judo black belt. Olympic medal and very fond of Eastern European women.”
How sweet. Two nonexistent people had found one another.
“He replied to my search ‘unsolved murder - incongruous hat’. His English was crap but he made up for it with his enthusiasm. He said this was the case that had most baffled him. A Japanese engineering firm was in Guam building a two-million-yen hotel.”
“Which is about fifty dollars.”
“All right, I don’t know, two-hundred billion yen – a very expensive hotel, twenty story, designed by a famous architect. One of the Japanese foremen supervising the local workers falls from the top of the almost complete hotel into the empty swimming pool. An accident, they all assume, until the coroner discovers a small-gauge bullet hole in his lower back.”
I was growing impatient. The figure on the beach was clearly my mother in her ninja costume.
“Does the incongruous hat arrive soon?” I asked.
“That was the confusing thing. Something nobody could explain. You know the Japs and their look-alike costumes. The firm that undertook the construction had their own very distinct uniforms: luminous green full-body overalls and white hard hats. No fashion statements. No individual touches. They were Japanese and they’d all arrived on the bus together that morning. But when the foreman hit the pool, he was wearing a bright orange hard hat. And do you know why?”
“Rebellion?”
“Somebody had spray painted his hat luminous orange while he was still wearing it.”
“He didn’t do it himself?”
“The paint was in his eyes, around his neck. There was no sign of a can. Whoever sprayed him took it with them. And they never found the shooter.”
It was weird and it was irrelevant and I was distressed to have been woken up so early and forced to listen to it.
“That’s great, Siss. Thanks.”
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“No, I am. Tired, that’s all. Let’s keep pushing on the orange hat thing. Good job. Listen, everyone’s growling here for breakfast. I’m going to have to leave you. Talk to you later.”
Bad start to the day: hangover, long stupid phone call, mother up to no good. It could only get better.
It didn’t.
Sitting in front of the kitchen block was a little man on a very old motorcycle. He weighed so little I imagined it was only his thick gold helmet that stopped him being blown off the saddle as he rode. In his hand he had a brown paper envelope.
“Are you Koon Jum?” he asked.
“Jimm.”
“That’s probably it.”
He handed me the envelope and drove off. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask him where he was from or why he’d ridden out at such an unholy hour to make his delivery. By the time I’d formulated all my questions he was gone. The envelope did indeed have the words ‘Koon Jum, Lovely Resort’, written in thick felt tip. I put on the pot to boil water, then ripped open the envelope. It contained a simple black and white election flyer. On the front was a photo of a grinning candidate with a large rosette on his shirt. The flyer was very old, the paper almost separating at the crease. If the name hadn’t been written there I would never have recognized the man. It was the decidedly younger and unplasticized face of Tan Sugit beside a large, handwritten, number three. It was the type of thing poll delegates would pass on, hand to hand in villages.
“Here’s twenty baht. This is the number you’ll vote for. We’ll know if you don’t and we’ll be back.”
The only thing that had changed since those days was the cost of a vote. You could get up to five hundred baht for your name on a list these days. I turned over the paper and on the back in scrawled handwriting were the words, “Ask his daughter about the VW.” It was written in some watery ink that had dried brown at the edges. I really wasn’t in the mood for a mystery.
Breakfast was a simple affair. Our guests had given up on us and driven off early to find somewhere else to eat. We couldn’t do that. We were captive. Most families would help themselves as they were coming and going from bed to work: rice porridge, a quick Chinese doughnut, some sort of dried meat, a plastic bag of warm soybean milk for the road. But Mair insisted we all eat breakfast together; sit down at one of our tables and ‘talk’. The policy hadn’t been a great success so far. Most mornings we’d just stoop over our plates and fuel up for the day. But, on this awful Sunday, Arny had an announcement to make.
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” he said, a smile sliming across his face. We all looked at him with our spoons and forks on pause, some full on their way up, some empty on their way down, but all static. For many years we’d hoped to hear such a proclamation. We’d encouraged him. I’d introduced him to girls at school. But by the time he’d reached thirty we’d come to the conclusion there was more likelihood of America getting an African American president than of Arny having a girlfriend. We’d all secretly assumed there was something of Sissi in him that he was trying to suppress. I blamed our absent father for his lack of male hormones. We’d all given up.
Mair dropped her spoon, leaped from her seat and threw her arms around her youngest.
“Oh, child,” she said, “I’m so pleased for you. Well done. Well done.”
I settled for reaching across and squeezing his hand. I was still suspicious. Granddad Jah, looking like death boiled up, stared at him in disbelief.
“Nice one, nong,” I said. “Who’s the unlucky girl?”
Mair returned to her seat with a damp and shiny face.
“Don’t be cruel,” she said. “What’s your young lady’s name, child?”
“Gaew,” he said, still beaming with pride.
“And what does she do?”
“She used to be a bodybuilder. I met her at the weight room at Bang Ga. She still does weights but she doesn’t compete anymore. Who’d have thought it? A little wooden gym in the countryside and I’d find someone like Gaew. I recognized her right away from her photos.”
“What photos, child?” Mair asked.
“In Body Thai.”
“She was in a magazine?”
“Not just in it. She had features regularly. International journals too. She was a celebrity.”
“And she lives in Bang Ga?” I asked. I hadn’t reached the goose-bump stage but I could certainly feel little prickles of foreboding.
“Even celebrities have to b
e born somewhere,” Arny reminded me. “Her family’s all there. I went to their house. All the awards. All the photos. It was like a museum. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of. She told me all her stories at lunch.”
“So, you’ve eaten with her?” Mair asked.
“Twice now. I took her into Lang Suan yesterday. We talked a lot. When we got back to her house there was nobody there. We almost had sex.”
Granddad dropped his doughnut. Mair laughed out loud.
“Arny,” I said, astonished. “We’re eating here. And you weren’t going to lose your big V until you found the big L, remember?”
“Oh, Jimm, really. This is it,” he said. “The heart freeze and everything. I know it’s right. I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
“Oh, child,” Mair said. “You’re a big boy now but there’s really no hurry. Trust me. How long have you known her?”
“Three days.”
“Three days, right. Then if it’s love after three days, it’ll still be love after three months. None of us wants to make commitments on impulse. I’m delighted, really. But passion is an egg. You have to see it grow into a chicken before you decide whether it’s a boiler or a roaster.”
Mair always had a way with idioms.
“What does Gaew think about all this?” I asked.
“She feels really exactly the same. She said as soon as she saw me it was ‘clunk’. That’s how it hit me, too. Clunk. She said she hadn’t felt that way since she met her first husband. She said it was a rare, almost impossible feeling to reproduce but she had it.”
The frame had paused again without us noticing.
“Her first husband?” Mair asked.
“Yeah. He was the one who got her into bodybuilding. He was an icon, too. Dom, Mick’s Gym, Purachart. He won the all-Asian title twice. You remember him. I had his poster on my wall when I was just starting out.”
“You started out when you were fourteen,” I reminded him.
“Yeah. Really” – Arny nodded – “that was a while ago, wasn’t it?”
Ahead of me was a metaphorical field which was peppered with metaphorical landmines. I could have progressed lightly and tiptoed around but I knew we were headed for a messy bang whatever I did.
“Nong?” I asked. “How old’s your girlfriend?”
“Fifty-eight.”
There was no shame or embarrassment in his voice. He’d said it proudly and loudly. It didn’t seem to cross his mind at all what effect such a statement might have on his fifty-seven-year-old mother. Mair hung on to her Titanic smile but couldn’t bring herself to speak. She wiped her mouth with a tissue, stood, and walked unsteadily in the direction of the shop. Arny watched her go with a real smile on his own face.
“Looks like Mair’s as excited about all this as I am,” he said.
The silence that followed was interrupted by the beep of a motorcycle horn. Ed rode past and waved. Sitting behind him was an attractive girl about my age. She smiled at me and put her hand to her heart. Not for the first time that day I didn’t know how to react, and it was barely seven o’clock.
♦
Lieutenant Chompu came by at eight. I’d given him the heads-up about my note. Granddad Jah and I piled into his truck and headed off out of Maprao. Da Endorphine, the slick ballad queen was cooing on the CD player. Of course, I was the girly in the backseat. Chompu read the note and flipped it over to look at the election poster.
“Any idea what year this might have been?” he asked.
“Seventies by the look of his tie and his sideburns,” Granddad said. “Probably the man’s first attempt at conning his way into public office.”
“But why was it delivered to me?” I asked. “Who knows I’m involved in the case?”
“You mean apart from all of Lang Suan, seventy-two percent of the province and approximately half the south of Thailand?” Chompu asked.
“All right, yes,” I agreed. “But why send it to me and not you lot?”
“Because nobody trusts the police,” said Granddad, matter-of-factly.
“That’s the truth,” said Chompu, “but I wouldn’t be surprised, given the events of last night, if this note isn’t part of a…deeper story.”
I noticed how Chompu liked to leave dramatic gaps, probably so they could edit in music bites later.
“What happened last night?” I asked.
“Of course, I’m not at liberty to divulge details of an ongoing case, but I can probably, at a pinch, tell you that they found your Tan Sugit handcuffed naked to a bench at the Lang Suan train station early this morning.”
“Dead?”
“Stop it. They can’t all be dead. We have a three-body-per-decade quota. No, he was bruised and woozy from some drug and he had the words sa som – ‘deserved’ – written on his belly in some animal blood. But he was very alive and thoroughly embarrassed. He told Lang Suan police it had been a terrorist attack. That they’d threatened to kill him but he’d been able to play on the sympathy of the kidnappers – a technique he’d learned, he said, from many years of dealing with southern insurgents – and they’d let him go unharmed.”
“But chained naked to a train station,” I pointed out.
“A symbolic gesture. A small victory.”
“What did he say they were after?”
“He hinted he might have been in possession of some sensitive documents on the new government policy for dealing with Muslim separatists.”
“Bunch of cow dung,” said Granddad.
“But you think it has something to do with my note?” I asked.
“Coincidences such as this only happen on television.”
We’d turned onto the highway and were heading north.
“Do you know anything about Sugit having a daughter?” I asked.
“Yes. I imagine you’d have seen her if you went to the house.”
“The fat girl? He treated her more like a maid.”
“She’s been living with him for several months, I heard. I think it’s important that we find out what she knows.”
“So, if you think the daughter is a key factor in solving the case, why are we heading away from Lang Suan?”
“All right, I’m not at liberty, et cetera, blah, blah, but I might have committed a slight error yesterday. Following our very pleasant lunch, I decided to follow up on your Sugit’s violent reaction to wicked Auntie Chainawat. I was curious to know why he disliked her so much. So I went over to Ranong.”
“And you’re afraid your visit was the reason for Sugit’s kidnapping. You think you’ve sparked a Chinese mafia war between two of the south’s most dangerous clans and that soon the entire region will be a battleground of blood and revenge.”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite as dramatically but yes, I may have hinted that Sugit had referred to the Chainawat family in less than glowing terms.”
“So, we’re going there now, as a team, heavy back-up, to accuse them of kidnapping and torture.”
“No, you’re going there as an innocent young lady and her elderly but very competent grandfather. I’ll be parking several blocks away. I can’t be seen there again, just in case I’m right about the feud. You just happened to be in the neighborhood and you had such a nice time when last you met them, you thought you’d stop in to say hello. You just need to get a sense of whether you think they had anything to do with last night.”
“And why should we do that?”
“Because you’re both as curious as I am.”
“And what if we’re right and they throw us in a cellar and cut us up into little pieces?”
“Then that’s proof that they’re up to no good. I’ll be able to wear my captain’s stripes to your funeral and shoot real bullets in the air. Can you believe I’ve never fired live rounds outside the shooting range? Such a shame. I’m a terribly good shot.”
Granddad Jah was grinning like a crocodile in the front seat. He loved all this. It was as if his life had been recharged. Me? I was wondering whethe
r we’d make it to lunchtime.
♦
“My mother wants to know why she should answer any of your questions.”
The son’s face had become even more enchanting since the last time I’d seen him but he was using his smile less generously. We were sitting at the same coffee table with probably the same uneaten rambutans and peanut snacks in front of us. The old lady’s fuse was shorter than ever without a uniformed policeman beside us. It had taken a very long time for her to grant us an audience and I could tell she wouldn’t be staying long. The question had been simple, “Do you know Koon Sugit Suttirat?”
With thoughts of torture and disembowelings in my mind, I planned to tread a very diplomatic path. But Granddad Jah headed off into the jungle again.
“Because Sugit says your family’s as corrupt as a Burmese general,” he said. “He told the press you couldn’t be trusted, then, a few hours later, he was kidnapped and tortured to within an inch of his life. That puts you way up there on the list of suspects.”
It was fascinating. I sort of admired my granddad and wanted to hit him over the head with a blunt machete at the same time. The son started to translate but Granddad interrupted him.
“Enough of that,” he said. “The old witch has been in the country forty years. She understands everything that’s being said, don’t you, dear? Yes. I’ve seen enough of these fake translation dramas to last me a second lifetime. You aren’t fooling anyone. It doesn’t make you look or sound like you’re somebody. You’re just another foreigner, no more or less important than those day laborers you employ out there.”
There followed several seconds of chilled silence.
“I more important than Burmese,” the old woman spat in clipped Thai. “More important than you, old man. Who are you?”
“None of your business,” he said.
That was it. That was when the hands clap and the coolies rush in with knives between their teeth and they bundle us down to the dungeon. Good one, Granddad. I held my breath. But it didn’t happen. She glared stiffly at my granddad until a horrid betel nut smile filled her little mouth. There was almost a flirt in her eyes.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 22