“What?”
“Do you think she might be on the run from the Medley people?”
“I doubt multinational milk companies hire hitmen to deal with troublesome correspondents. But I guess they could make life uncomfortable. Look at this last letter from the Medley Legal Department.”
Attention: Dr. Somluk Shinabut
The Medley Corporation and its associates take personal threats very seriously. We would prefer to avoid pursuing legal proceedings against you, but if you continue with this personal vendetta based on groundless accusations and insinuations, we will have no choice other than to lodge libel charges with the police and pursue the matter in court.
“Looks like the doctor got somebody’s attention after all,” I said.
“She hit a nerve, right enough,” said Da.
“The Internet,” I said. “It can make a lion of the tiniest ant.”
That wasn’t my line. I think Donald Trump or somebody said it.
“Can I take the disc and go through it at home?” I asked.
“No problem.”
* * *
Back at the resort, I saw a familiar motorcycle sidecar combo in the car park. Captain Kow had presumably removed the fried-fish ball attachment to make space for his beloved to sit. Now that was class. I found the happy couple on Mair’s veranda, holding hands. Mair was gloriously pretty in a hibiscus print frock and an unashamed beaming smile. Sitting opposite were Arny and Grandad Jah.
“Well, at last you bother to show up,” said Grandad.
“Hello, Mair,” I said. “Sea too rough for you, was it?”
“I could have handled it,” said Mair. “But your father insisted I come ashore.”
I still couldn’t get used to that “Father” tag.
“How long did you last?” I asked.
“Half an hour,” said Grandad. “Some tough fisherman, he is.”
“So where have you been?” I asked.
“The One Hotel in Surat,” said Mair. “It was a first honeymoon. We never did have one back then.”
“And here we were worried frantic about you, and there you were fornicating on a bed in a sleazy motel,” said Grandad.
I don’t recall Grandad worrying or even mentioning Mair in all the time she was gone. But he did have a point.
“Couldn’t you have phoned?” I asked.
“I told her she should,” said the captain. “But you know what she’s like.”
I knew less and less what she was like.
“I wanted you all to get used to not having me around,” said Mair. “It’s like the mother hen leaving the hive and all the workers having to sort out where to store the honey without a technical adviser. And certainly without jars. It was such a lovely place and the staff were so polite.”
I assumed she’d stopped referring to the chicken hive.
“So are we having our family powwow at last?” I asked, and speed-dialed Sissi for the quorum. It was one of the few things I’d learned to do on that phone.
“Not exactly,” said Mair. “There’s just the one thing that I need to clear up.”
“Hang on,” I said. The phone took its time. “Siss? You busy? The seafaring mother has returned, and she’s got an announcement to make.”
“If she’s pregnant, I’m putting myself up for adoption,” said Sissi.
“Wait, I’m putting you on Skype and sitting you on a nice chair so you can see everyone. Comfortable?”
“Very. Hello, Mair.”
“Hello, darling,” said Mair. “Now, isn’t this lovely. We’re all here together. It’s quite exciting. Children, there’s something I need to tell you about your father.”
“Huh. Some father,” said Grandad Jah.
Mair steeled herself and took a deep breath, like a gymnast before a floor routine. There was no Titanic smile.
“Well, that’s just it, you see?” said Mair. “Here you all are having bad thoughts about poor Captain Kow when it’s me you should be blaming. The truth is I first met Kow here in Maprao thirty-eight years ago. Oh my. He was handsome and so virile. He could—”
“Mair, can we skip the details?” said the cell phone.
“I was so in love with him,” Mair continued, “but he was a common fisherman and I was a university graduate. He was terribly unworldly.”
Captain Kow’s face hardly changed its expression this whole time. There was still a slight crack of a smile between his lips. The merest shadow of the gap between his teeth.
“I thought how beautiful my children would be if he fathered them,” Mair continued. “But I didn’t want to live here. Oh my. If you think this is backward now, imagine what it was like thirty-eight years ago. It was prehysterical.”
I had visions of mad dinosaurs queuing up at the 7-Eleven.
“I wanted my children to grow up cultured,” Mair said. “To give them a good, international upbringing. And I wanted you all to grow up in Chiang Mai. I frankly didn’t think Kow would be able to advance you the way I hoped. I had your upbringings all worked out. Sissi, darling, I’m sorry you turned out female. I hadn’t reckoned that into my calculations.”
“That’s okay,” said the cell phone.
“If I’d married an educated man in the north, he would have insisted on a traditional upbringing for you. Whereas I wanted you to be children of the world. So … I hired Kow to come to Chiang Mai and be your father.”
“You what?”
On reflection, I think we all may have said that at the same time. It was the only instance I can recall us being coordinated as a family.
“Three years or three children. Whichever came first,” she said. “That was the deal.”
“Oh, say this isn’t happening,” said Grandad.
“I didn’t want him around after three years, you see?” said Mair. “And he was really itching to get back to his sea and his squids. So it worked out quite well. You were his life experience—like Peace Crops. He took odd jobs in Chiang Mai, mostly laboring, just to keep himself from getting bored. Producing children isn’t exactly an occupation, you see. Not for a man. Three ten-second spurts at the most. But I confess I did insist on a lot of practice. And we needed him around for signing documents and the like.”
I remember being speechless just four times in my life but never like this, with my mouth open and my eyes bulging like an ornamental goldfish.
“Where did you get all this … this procurement money from?” asked Grandad.
“Oh, he wasn’t that expensive,” said Mair, the way you’d discuss a secondhand bicycle. “And I’d put away quite a bit from when I was selling marijuana at the university.”
“You what?” said Grandad.
“Don’t worry, Father. They still sold it at country markets back then. It wasn’t actually illegal. And I only dealt to students. NO CHANCE of undercover cops spoiling that gig.”
Arny and I put our heads in our hands, and the little screen Sissi was doing the same in Chiang Mai. Mair just rattled on as if she wasn’t unleashing the dragons.
“And you all had a legal father without the negatives,” she said. “When it was all over, we had one last night of passion, I took him to the train station on my bicycle … actually he pedaled us there and I pedaled back alone. And I thought that was that. Everything had gone so smoothly.
“But then he started to write. That really wasn’t part of the deal. I supposed he must have jotted down the address from the postal box, and once a month I’d get a few lines telling me about Maprao and asking after you lot. I didn’t want to encourage him, so I didn’t reply.”
“What, never?” Sissi shouted.
“Not for the first twenty years,” she said.
I found my voice.
“And you kept writing, Captain Kow?” I asked.
“Every month. Regular as clockwork,” he said and smiled so wide I could see his tonsils through the gap.
“Why?” asked Arny.
The captain leaned back on his chair, almost buc
kling the plastic legs. He looked at us all in turn with an expression of … I suppose it was pride.
“Sometime in those three years I was up there in the north, I fell in love with your mother,” he said. “I knew she didn’t want me in her life, but, well, it’s like when you’ve got a big fish on a fragile line. You can’t give it one big yank ’cause you know it’ll snap. So you tug gently and often and it tires the fish out.”
He grinned and I had a ghost image of those beautiful missing teeth.
“Isn’t that romantic?” said Mair. “He tugged on me till I was completely tuckered out. The hook bloody inside my mouth to the point that I could only ingest passing plankton, because I couldn’t chew on say, mackerel or sandfish. But whales … I mean look how big they grow on tiny little water vermin. If I’d been—”
“Mair!” Sissi shouted. “Enough with the fish.”
“No need to shout,” said Mair.
“Go on,” I told her.
“It was the day Arny finished high school,” she said, “and started his physical trainer’s course. I felt … I felt that in your own unique ways, you had excelled. I had produced three remarkable children. Not counting steroids, none of you were on drugs. No criminal records. You were all independent and so not mainstream, it made me cry with pride. So I wrote to Kow to let him know. It was rather a long letter.”
“One hundred and thirty-four pages,” said Kow. “A4.”
“Well, I had a lot to tell him,” said Mair. “Sissi, your rise in show business and leanings toward severing your links to manhood. Jimm and your remarkable intelligence and language skills. Arny’s magnificent body. I wanted Kow to see how beautiful you’d all turned out. So I sent photos.”
“Two hundred and sixty-one,” said the captain. “Taken from the day I left through every birthday and school award and beauty competition and hospital visit.”
“And so we became penfriends,” said Mair. “And after all those years of hearing about Maprao, I started to fall in love with the place and, very slowly, with the man who’d tugged on me all that time. And when I found that my mind was starting to go, all I could think of was for all of us to be together here in the place that Sissi was conceived.”
“Wait!” shouted the cell phone. “I’m a bastard?”
“Of course you aren’t,” said Mair. “We tied the knot right here at the Ny Kow Temple. You were the result of that blessed, star-filled wedding night on the beach, right here when it was still deserted and unpolluted and startlingly beautiful. Just like you.”
She squeezed Captain Kow’s hand, and they stared into each other’s eyes like models in an ancient chocolate commercial.
* * *
There was nothing more to be said. It was hard to decide who to hate first: my mother, who’d hired a fisherman’s son to fertilize her or the squid boy for agreeing to … damn, there wasn’t even a word for it. We all walked away from that meeting in zombie silence. The cell phone was speechless in my hand. I waded through the beach garbage down to the angry surf and squinted into the salt wind. It was a long while before I raised Sissi to my ear.
“You still there, Sis?”
“Just.”
“Can we…?”
“Not talk about it?”
“I think I need time for this one.”
“We all do.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“All right.”
I sat on a Brother printer, circa 1980, and was wondering whether there were entire reefs of discarded IT equipment down in the Gulf that would one day regenerate the fish stocks, when the phone vibrated in my hand.
“No, wait. I have information,” said my sister. “Sorry, I forgot.”
A distraction. Perfect.
“Your conference in Chumphon,” she said. “You were wondering why your Dr. Somluk was so upset about who sponsored Dr. Bangkok?”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m thinking she just targeted the biggest name as an example.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I went through the accounts of all the speakers at that conference. Locals and overseas experts. And you know what? Every last one of them was paid to be there by the Medley umbrella organization, the TFG. And I looked at the papers. Virtually all of them dealt with the inherent dangers of breastfeeding in rural communities. They had scientific data to support their arguments. And you know who comprised eighty percent of the participants?”
“Midwives?”
“And nursery school teachers,” she said.
“So it was a set-up,” I said. “Select your speakers. Tell ’em what to say. Fill the place with professionals who work directly with mothers, and mail them a lot of free samples to get them hooked on the product. Off they go to spread the word. Formula is the future. Mother Nature got it wrong. This is what the Lord Buddha would have given pregnant women if only he’d had access to a clean chemistry lab. But I still don’t understand why the experts would be so easily lured into the honeytrap, Sis. Don’t any of them have morals?”
“There are things more important than morals, Jimm.”
“Like money?”
“Like how to take care of an elderly mother.”
“You found something?”
“Dr. Aisa, your Bangkok specialist. She has a mother in a hospice. Cancer. She’s been hanging on for almost two years. Up until a year ago, Dr. Bangkok was a prominent voice against the abuse of formula. She was the same type of thorn in the side of Medley that your Dr. Somluk is threatening to be. Then, quite out of the blue, she had a change of heart. New research findings. Improved production methods. New additives. Perhaps formula wasn’t quite as bad as she’d thought.”
“And her mother’s hospice care is miraculously taken care of.”
“You’ve got it.”
“That’s why Dr. Somluk targeted Dr. B. These people are monsters. We have to find Somluk. She’s hiding out somewhere in need of friends. She’s too afraid of her phone being tapped to call old colleagues. I reckon she’s been threatened to keep her mouth shut.”
“Or someone’s already shut it for her.”
I shuddered at that possibility.
“I’m into Dr. Somluk’s e-mail account,” said Sissi. “There have been no sent messages for seven days. You might be right. She might be playing it cool. As soon as she feels confident enough to get in touch with anyone, I’ll be on it.”
“I just…”
“What?”
“I just wonder whether big business might be on it too. Maybe they really are looking for her.”
* * *
I was on my way back to my cabin when Grandad Jah popped out from behind a hedge like an anorexic mugger. I was afraid he might want to engage me in a debate on why none of us look like Captain Kow … or each other. But like all of us he was opting to keep quiet on the subject.
“I’ve been watching your Burmese,” he said.
“Good man.”
“They’re both illegal.”
“You can tell that just by watching them?”
“They live in a room in Kor Kow Temple, just down from your elderly boyfriend’s place. He pays protection money to the nun there.”
“So she doesn’t beat them up?”
“So she doesn’t report them to the police. I went through their belongings while they were up at the house. They are not married.”
“Wow. All this in one day? I’m impressed. Are they living in sin?”
“They’re brother and sister.”
“What? The nun told you?”
“There were photographs of the pair of them from a young age. With parents. Progressing through school. It was a rural school where all the pupils studied in one room. There was a photo with the kids’ names written in English. Your Burmese have the same surname. I rather doubt they got married when they were five.”
“So why would they pretend to be married now?”
“As yet I do not have an answer to that question.”
“Any insights into the machete or the sack?”
“No indications from their room. They may have a hiding place. I shall endeavor to find it. Do you happen to know when your author might be away from home?”
“He’s in Bangkok.”
“Perfect. A rowing boat, a pair of binoculars and the property without its master could yield up a vast array of data. People in glass houses should not expect to keep secrets.”
12.
It Is Our Pressure If You Come Again
(guest house sign)
Given her less-than-truthful replies to my earlier questions, I decided to pay another visit to Dr. June, the head of the Regional Clinic Allocations Department at Lang Suan hospital. To add weight to this second interview, I took my own policeman. Lieutenant Chompu, on day five of his program to recover from homosexuality, was still hiding from the psychologist in one of our cabins. Even though the income at our resort in the monsoon season was approximately zero, I hadn’t charged him for the room, so he owed me. He was miffed that I’d aced him on the CD clue, so he’d been particularly pedantic going through Dr. Somluk’s files. She was a one-woman campaign. If you believed everything she wrote, you’d have to think Medley had shares in the Thai Ministry of Health. The company sponsored doctor fact-finding missions and mother-and-child picnics and half a dozen TV spots on childcare issues. Medley incarnate was a six-foot blue teddy bear who cuddled overweight toddlers in shopping malls all over the country. The world according to Dr. Somluk was snowing formula. The new operating theater at the Lang Suan hospital had been funded quite unashamedly by Medcafé. The blue bear would be appearing in person next month to cut the ribbon and officially open this state-of-the-art medical facility. A five-meter-high poster to that effect had been erected on the highway in front of the hospital.
Chompu and I had come to discuss this and other matters. We were directed toward the new building, latticed with bamboo scaffolding that tentatively supported a dozen painters arranged like shelf ornaments. We found Dr. June inside haranguing the foreman of the work team. She was not leaning on the side of diplomacy and her regional accent became more pronounced the louder she shouted.
The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Page 15