I should have taken more notice of that last comment, but I’m a non-native speaker and I assumed it was related somehow to something he’d said earlier. But there it was. Momentary loss of control. I didn’t need to be native to recognize that. He looked up into my eyes, to see whether I’d noticed his nakedness. He stared into my face until it was almost uncomfortable, before his lips peeled back like mangosteen rind to show me the irresistible whiteness inside.
“What she got was a closed joint bank account,” he said. “A studio apartment with a view of the apartment block next door, and an Italian restaurateur named Giuseppe.”
“And how do you know all this?” I asked.
“She told me a couple of weeks ago. She turned up on the doorstep with the suitcase and the foam box she’d left with. She said she’d thought it over and decided her life would be better with me. I sat her down at the kitchen table with a gin and tonic and asked her how she’d been spending her nights since I kicked her out. I recorded the whole conversation on my phone. As a writer, you can never have too much original material. She relaxed. She thought that a confession—of everything—would cleanse her. Make her pure again in my eyes. But the woman I loved was already a character in a story. And the story ended and the character stopped being real. You may fall for Gatsby while you’re reading how great he is, but when you turn that last page, you have to draw the line between life and fiction. My wife had stopped existing.”
I looked into his damp blue eyes and my heart sagged. I hadn’t counted on this much honesty over lunch.
“So you shot her,” I said. Well, I thought the situation could use a little levity. His eyebrows rose and seemed to nudge his mind back to the here and now. He laughed. He was a good laugher.
“Drove her to the airport and put her on the first flight,” he said.
The under-Sprinter motorcycle was being removed in small pieces. Like Conrad Coralbank’s heart, I doubted they’d ever put it back together again. Beer tended to make me morose. I wanted to crawl through the empty plates and hug my old author, say “There, there” and stroke his hair. He was perfect. All but one of the questions had been answered. His wife was a heartless wench. Mair was right. She had seen her two weeks before on her way to beg forgiveness. Conrad was telling the truth, and now he was being stalked by an aggressive maid. He was doubly a victim. A poor soul. And so to the final question.
“Why did you agree to this stupid interview?” I asked.
We were sharing a plate of pineapple chunks on toothpicks at this point.
“I thought it might enhance my career,” he said, straight-faced.
I glared at him with one eyebrow raised. A month earlier he’d been featured in a five-page spread in Cosmopolitan. The Chumphon News wasn’t even a lifeboat on that great ocean queen.
“All right,” he confessed. “I didn’t agree. I like my anonymity. I always refuse local news and TV interviews. But your Khun Boot wrote back, saying he had a world-class reporter named Jimm Juree who was a near neighbor of mine and she was willing to do the interview. That’s when I said yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d—”
“Well, what a blast” came a high-pitched squeal from somewhere behind me. Conrad’s eyelids sprang open. I turned to see a slim man in the uniform of a police lieutenant mince across the restaurant floor like the opening act of Simon Transvestite cabaret. He put his hands to his cheeks.
“Jimm Juree,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”
Lieutenant Chompu was the only unashamedly camp police officer in Thailand. He certainly wasn’t the only gay policeman—not by a long pole—but his refusal to restrain his feminine side, particularly in moments of high drama, had resulted in his transfer to the last stop on the line: Pak Nam. It was a sad end for a man with keen instincts and brilliant policing skills. His timing, on the other hand …
He held out a limp hand to Conrad and, in surprisingly good English, said, “How you do? I’m Chompu.”
Conrad shook the hand but was unable to retrieve his own, even as my darling policeman sat on the bench beside my would-be darling author. He was clearly drunk.
“Where you come from?” Chom asked, gazing lovingly into Conrad’s eyes.
“I’m from England,” he replied with more politeness than the onslaught deserved.
“I’m come from Thailand,” said Chom. “Please to meet you.”
“And you.”
“Do you having sex with my friend?”
An invisible axe diced my face into small croutons.
“Chompu,” I shouted from behind my unreal smile. “What a nice surprise.” And in Thai: “What hole did you crawl out of?”
“You didn’t see me over there in the corner with my fellow crime-fighters?”
“No.”
“I’ve been watching your every move. You’re such a vixen. And look at this…” He switched to English. “Excuse me. Are you speak Thai?”
“Yes, I’m fluent,” said Conrad, his hand still a prisoner in Chom’s.
“I think that means no,” said the policeman back in our own language. “Let’s test him. Sir, I would like to lick your nipples.”
“Chom?” I shouted.
“What? It’s a compliment. He’s just so adorable, right down to the Berluti loafers.”
He reverted his gaze into the Englishman’s eyes, waiting for some response. My author smiled and said something long and passionate, in what I took to be French. Chom gave him a smile of admiration.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to be intoxicated while in uniform,” I said.
“What makes you think I’m toxilated?”
“A: You have my gentleman friend’s hand in yours. B: You only attempt to speak English when you’re high. And C: You didn’t zip up after your last pee.”
Lieutenant Chompu imploded with embarrassment, released my author, and crossed his legs.
“I not chuck my zip,” he said unnecessarily, for the benefit of Conrad.
Conrad had started to look uncomfortable, at last.
“You have to leave us now,” I said.
“But we’re—”
“Goodbye, Lieutenant.”
Chompu nodded, wai’d Conrad beautifully, and stood to leave, his zip miraculously closed.
“Who is that over there with you getting you all sloshed?” I asked.
“We’re on the job,” he slurred. “It’s the new police psychologist from Bangkok. It’s a new service of the police ministry to help us poorly paid officers cope with mental stresses. She’s quite remarkable. She asked the Chumphon police commander to nominate officers with a wide range of mental disorders. He came up with a chronic depressive, an alcoholic, a kleptomaniac, a bed wetter, and little old pervert me. We’re sharing our intimate secrets at a group therapy lunch in a busy restaurant.”
“With whiskey?”
“Johnny Black. It’s her method. Alcotherapy. She’s got a PhD in it, so who are we to argue? And we all get three days off.”
“OK. You can go now. I’ll catch up with all this craziness tomorrow. I’ll give you a call.”
“Goodbye, handsome old man,” said Chompu and blew Conrad a kiss before returning to his table.
“Now that,” said Conrad, “was particularly weird. Do you have any more friends like that?”
I was about to say, “You should meet my family,” but it might have sounded like an invitation. And he already knew Mair.
“A few,” I said.
We heard a cheer from the train station and turned in time to see one large metal train wheel abandon its colleagues, roll a few meters, then clatter against the track. The station master was furious and proceeded to stamp and whip the train with his cap.
“You know?” Conrad laughed. “One lunch and I have enough material for two short stories. You really are quite remarkable.”
“Me? Why? You chose the place.”
“I have a feeling that anywhere you go you’d attract the bizarre.”
“You have a way with compliments, Mr. Coralbank.”
“I know, look. I’m sorry. You’re right. One of the reasons I wanted this lunch was to apologize for the misunderstanding at my house. I was hoping I might earn a second chance. Now here I am suggesting you’re bizarre. I just find myself tongue-tied when I’m near you. You bring out the Pushkin in me.”
I had no idea what that meant but didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
“I forgive you,” I said.
“Thank you.”
All the faults I’d erected around him had come tumbling down over lunch. He was a brilliant writer—I hadn’t actually read anything he’d written at that point but Goodreads said he was a four-star hit—he was funny, smart, disconcertingly human, handsome … and he liked me. How much better could it get? I had a dream once. An e-mail arrived telling me my car registration number had won the Canadian National Sweepstake. I knew it was ridiculous, but I still ran through all the things I’d do with two million dollars. I turned a blind eye to the logic of it all. Then the check arrived.
That’s how I felt as I rode my Honda Dream back to the resort.
6.
Sorry for the Incontinence
(condominium notice)
Gogo had reacted badly to the antibiotics and was on a drip. Her eyes didn’t have pupils. They looked like steamed-up shaving mirrors. Mair was off on her second honeymoon cruise. Grandad Jah still hadn’t returned with the Mighty X. It was just me, Arny, and the lifeless dog. Outside, Sticky and Beer lay with their noses up against the mesh screen door.
“You think she’ll die?” Arny asked.
“The vet was amazed she’d made it this far,” I told him. “She’s allergic to everything, her intestines don’t work, she has a dodgy liver but has no qualms at all about eating germ-infested dead things on the beach. She has a death wish. I wouldn’t be surprised if she switched the anesthetic bottles while the doctor had his back turned. It’s Munchhoundsen’s.”
Arny didn’t get that but not many people would have. I have a thriving internal entertainment system.
“What do we do if she…?” he asked.
He had tears in his eyes.
“We bury her deep so the others don’t dig her up and eat her.”
“How can you be so cold?”
“They’re rescue dogs. They have a code. ‘Eat thy sister.’ It’s tough out there on the streets.”
“What do you have against dogs? They have so much affection for us.”
“Right. Then what? Twelve years down the track they keel over and die. Remember Bruce?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t. You were too young. Bruce was Granny Noi’s poodle. He was one of those goo-goo-eyed dogs that suck you in with their wiggly backsides and their fake smiles. You could throw the ball fifty times and he’d bring it back every damned time. Never once thought, ‘The girl apparently doesn’t want this ball.’ He lay on my bed, and before I went to sleep, we’d make plans for the future. World travel. Maybe open a little people/dog restaurant down near Tapae Gate. I’d hire a retired baseball pitcher to throw his damned ball as often as he liked. We were the same age, you see, and on my ninth birthday he was gray-haired and old. I threw the ball and he’d just lie there waiting for it to come back. A month later he was stiff. Such a disappointment, was Bruce.”
I tried to sleep that night but found myself listening to the weak pants coming from Gogo on the bathroom mat. So I ended up sleeping on the floor with two fingers on her pulse. It had nothing to do with affection. It was the only way I could get to sleep. When I woke up just after five, Gogo and I were in the fetal position, she curled against my stomach. Body fluids all around. Sticky and Beer had wire mesh imprints on their noses. I took them for their early morning walk, although they were reluctant to leave the patient. A relentless wind had started up sometime in the night, and it swept foam off the waves. The tide was high, and what little beach remained was piled high with bamboo and booze bottles washed downriver after the latest flash floods. I looked out across the metallic gray sea to where my mother was probably throwing up for the tenth time. The surf was over two meters and I could imagine Captain Kow saying, “Get over it, woman, for hell’s sake. It’s just a wee squall.” No boat was visible now, but its grubby gray paintwork would have it camouflaged better than a white cat up a green tree. Have heart, Mother.
As it was my duty, I headed for the kitchen to make breakfast. I passed the Mighty X in the car park. On the back was a log the size of our water tank. It was so heavy the truck bed sat low on its suspension. The rear license plate was in the sand. Grandad had brought home some serious wood. I hoped he hadn’t dipped into the household kitty to buy it. Never a dull moment at our place. I was a little surprised once I reached the kitchen to find one of my meat cleavers embedded in the door. It pinned a sheet of paper there. On it was written a short message in English.
BACK OFF OR YOU WILL BE NEXT
I’d had threatening letters before. The Chiang Mai Mail had a noticeboard where we could all enjoy the penmanship. My favorite was from a Ukrainian pedophile I’d helped put away,
YOU BEECH. YOU WRITE BAD THINK ABOUT ME I BAT YOU.
I never did get batted. We journalists would write editorial notes recommending better grammar and less physically impossible alternatives. I’d never had a meat-cleaver delivery before. And it was in so deep, the blade came clear through the other side. Somebody was pissed off. The good news was that the cleaver was in the door and not in me. None of us locked our cabins down here, and the kitchen door didn’t even have a latch. If anyone was so poor they’d come looking for food in our larder, they were welcome to it. Then one thing occurred to me. What if the cleaver ninja had come to my room? What if my being curled up unseen on the floor with Gogo had saved my life?
I needed both hands to wrestle the cleaver from the door, but I’d had the foresight to put on my orange Handy Pandy washing-up gloves to preserve the evidence. At first glance, the paper had nothing more to offer up than the threat, until I turned it over. There, in the top right-hand corner, was a thumbprint. It was about the same size as my own. I sniffed at the paper. I have an excellent nose. The mark was printed in neither ink nor paint. And even without the aid of a chemistry lab, I was quite certain the maroon print had been made in blood. Creepy, but cool all the same.
I had no idea what to back off from, or for whom I would be next or why, so I prepared breakfast. Once I had Grandad Jah and Arny seated with their rice porridge and homemade Chinese doughnuts in front of them, I placed the note, reattached to the cleaver, in front of them.
“What’s that?” Grandad asked.
“It’s a threatening note with a meat cleaver attached to it. I found it in the kitchen door when I arrived this morning. I consider myself duly threatened.”
They read it.
“What makes you think it was to you?” Grandad asked. He was great at plucking people from the center of their universes. Of course. It wasn’t always about me. Often, but not always.
“Are you involved in anything?” I asked him.
“I was a policeman,” he said. “Twenty years in jail can make a criminal hungry for revenge.”
He was right. I’d seen De Niro in Cape Fear. But Grandad had been a traffic policeman. I doubted too many of his arrests for unpaid parking tickets had left jail after two nights, bent on vengeance.
“Could it have anything to do with that log on the back of the truck?” I asked.
He said “No” through quivering lips.
“Grandad. It’s time for honesty. This isn’t a friendly threat. Our family’s under assault. No secrets.”
“They … they wouldn’t have known,” he said.
“Who wouldn’t have known what?”
“The Forestry Department.”
“You stole a log from the Forestry Department?”
Grandad dipped the last of his doughnut into the rice porridge and sucked it till there
was nothing left.
“I rescued it,” he said.
“From danger?”
“From frivolity. Abuse. Misuse. I read about it in the local paper. They were going to carve a giant squirrel out of it. Chop it down to next to nothing. That there is a chunk of prime teak. It deserves better.”
“And you have a more fitting purpose for it.”
“Yes.”
“So you stole it.”
“Rescued it. Yes.”
“And how did you get it on the truck?”
“I wore a suit.”
“And that makes you stronger?”
“It makes you powerful. Nobody questions an old man in a suit. I took the plates off the truck and told the workers to load it. They loaded it without question. I drove off.”
“Since when have you had a suit?”
“Since 1978. Granny Noi bought it for me to wear at her funeral. Said she didn’t want me to look like a bum.”
“But you didn’t wear it.”
“She was dead. She wouldn’t have known.”
I sighed and went over the words of the note in my mind. “Back off or you will be next.”
Even if someone had recognized Grandad and followed him home, the note was a non-sequitur, or some similar phrase to that. And I also doubted anyone at the Forestry Department could write in English. I didn’t even bother to ask Arny if he was under threat. He’d never antagonized anyone. So it was at my door. I had to back off. But off what? Or did I know already?
* * *
“So, that yummy young democrat’s running the show now, I see.”
“Siss, I told you—”
“Who’s talking politics? Not me. I’m talking sex.”
I was determined not to waste another minute discussing my country’s failure as a democracy. Not because I had no interest in the topic but because it had all become so embarrassing. In fact, I’m only prepared to give it one sentence.
In a nutshell: in the past year a rabble of yellow-shirted yuppie royalists had invaded our government house and redecorated it, an embarrassing drinking buddy of the ousted PM had been named as his successor and was subsequently kicked out for accepting a fee for regular cooking segments on national TV (the dignity of a dung beetle), to be replaced by the ousted PM’s brother-in-law who—as Government House was currently running bingo nights—was forced to set up a mobile parliament in the smokers’ lounge at Don Muang Airport but, not to be outsmarted by this canny move, the yellow shirts took over both Don Muang and Suvanaphum airports, causing a godzillion baht’s worth of damage to the economy and pissing a lot of travelers off in the process, and the last thing anyone heard, the brother-in-law PM was chairing cabinets in a truck stop on the Bang Na-Trat highway which gave the yellow shirts time to notice an irregularity in the voting process—one of the candidates “looked funny”—so as December rolled around, the losing democrats had been hauled out of obscurity to join one more unholy alliance of demonic political parties and their wunderkind leader miraculously became PM, returning his yellow shirt to the closet just in time.
The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Page 7