I’m exhausted and wired both. The processing unit between my ears is buzzing like a hornet’s nest, but my limbs are so weary I can hardly move them. I know I’m not going to be able to sleep whatever happens; why put off until tomorrow the humiliation that could be mine tonight? The only precaution I take is to enter my hovel silently, careful not to disturb Chanya and the Lump, take my service revolver out from under the mattress where I left it, and go out again into the street. When a cab stops, I tell the driver to take me back to the Parthenon. I get out about a hundred yards before the club, though, pay off the driver, and wait. It is four twenty-three by the clock on my cell phone. The last of the girls are leaving, wearing jeans and T-shirts, saying goodnight to one another in tired tones. The men who work mostly behind the scenes are going home too. From a dark corner I wait until everyone has gone; almost everyone. A tall, closed van of the kind used for wholesale food deliveries draws up. In the blaze of the Parthenon’s entrance lights I recognize the doorman, who has changed out of his uniform and is now in shorts and singlet. The arrival of the body bag from out of the building and its delivery into the back of the van takes less than twenty seconds. Now the van is gone, and only the doorman is left, staring after it. He fishes a cell phone from his pocket, listens to it for a moment, then stares down the soi in my direction.
Suddenly the hunter is hunted. I wait like a scared rabbit while he unhurriedly walks down the soi until he has found me. I know that the distortion in the right pocket of his shorts is caused by the cell phone; a gun would be bigger. Nor does he look especially lethal in his physique: a couple of inches shorter than me, about forty-five with a potbelly.
Now he is peering curiously at me. “Are you going to assassinate me tonight?” he asks. He reaches out with both hands to pull me by the lapels of my jacket. It’s not an aggressive move, and I wonder what he has in mind until I realize he is dragging me toward a streetlamp. He positions us so that I can get a good look at his face. It is twisted in spiritual agony. He prods at the gun in my pocket.
“Why don’t you kill me? I would consider it a favor.” I stare into his anguish. He swallows hard. “My wife and daughter are both servants in his mansion. He treats them well. They’re not beautiful, so he never lays a hand on them. But I’m his slave. I hope you understand.”
20
“A body fitting the description you gave last night arrived at the morgue at six this morning,” Dr. Supatra says. She has called while I’m getting dressed. Chanya is at the wat begging the Buddha to overlook her former profession and provide a healthy, happy, and above all lucky baby.
“Who brought it?”
“Detective Inspector Kurakit.”
“Where did he say the body was found?”
“At an apartment rented by the deceased.”
“You were not invited to investigate the scene?”
“No.”
“Thanks,” I say, and close the phone.
I call Manny, Vikorn’s secretary, to ask her to put me through to the boss. I can tell by her tone that she’s been primed already. “He’s out at a meeting.”
“No, he’s not.”
“He’s very busy, Detective. I’m not sure he’s got time for you today.”
“I want to know why I’m not on the new murder case that came in this morning.”
“Do you want me to ask him for you?”
“No. He’ll say it’s because I have my hands full already. I want to speak to him.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
No call comes, of course. Our protocol is of such rigidity that he might as well have taken a trip to the moon—there is no way of getting to him if he doesn’t want to see me. I guess I’ll have to try to deal with Kurakit. It would have to be him, of course.
We don’t hate each other, for the simple reason that to hate another person you have to understand them on some level. Kurakit is as baffled by me as I am by him. From his point of view, I’m an idiot who should never have been recruited in the first place. A devout Buddhist and a former soldier, to Kurakit and millions like him, life is very simple: find a billet, identify the boss, do whatever he tells you to do, and accept the promotions that follow. To him, my complicated psychology is a sure sign of insanity. He has, of course, been warned that I might call.
“How are you?” I ask with as much bonhomie as I can muster.
Suspiciously: “Okay.”
“I hear a new case came in early this morning.”
“Who told you?”
“Is it a secret?”
“It’s my case. Colonel Vikorn called me at home at four o’clock this morning. You’re too busy to deal with it.”
“I’m not trying to steal it from you. It might be connected to something I’m working on —maybe we should brainstorm together.”
“Brain what? What are you talking about? It’s not connected to anything you’re working on.”
“How do you know?”
“Vikorn said so. He said if you called, I was to tell you it’s not connected.”
“Did he tell you who did it?”
“No.”
“But he told you who didn’t do it?”
“Maybe.”
“Did he tell you a certain senior banker named Tanakan had nothing to do with it?”
“Yes. No. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
He hangs up. I call again. “At least let me have the address where the body was found.”
“No. I’m not allowed to.”
This time I hang up. I call Dr. Supatra instead to ask her for the address on the admission form that Kurakit must have completed. She’s too busy to deal with it right now but promises to fax the form to me, which includes Nok’s ID number and her original address in her home village. While I’m waiting for the fax, the FBI calls.
“Sonchai, d’you know I think what you’re doing is evil? I’ve thought about it—there’s no other word. It’s so medieval, like castrating choirboys or something. He’s only doing it to sell his body, isn’t he?”
“I told you why he’s doing it.”
“I don’t buy it. It’s an Oriental cover-up. You people, I’m starting to get the picture here, you still play this game of making ugly things look pretty so you can sell them.”
“Advertising is a Western invention. Ever watch a cigarette advertisement? They used to feature pure mountain streams, so they could sell poison that gave people lung cancer. I was bombarded with them throughout my youth. So were you, probably. You’ve just got a dose of culture shock, that’s all.”
“It’s so grotesque. Cutting everything off like that, then giving him a phony vagina. Ugh!”
“Do you feel the same way about breast implants? If you do, you could start a nice new pressure group in your own country, keep yourself occupied for decades.”
She fumes over the telephone. “You think I’m just another lost farang woman looking for a soapbox to bitch on, don’t you?”
“I think you’re in love with Lek,” I say.
Two beats pass. Cautiously: “Is he gay?”
“For Buddha’s sake, no. He’s never had sex in his life and likely never will. With his kind of katoey, the lust is all in the conversation. They can be quite prudish when it comes to the crunch. I told you, he’s a female spirit in a man’s body. All he wants to do is express his inner truth. Sorry if it’s difficult.” Exasperated, I hang up.
She calls again in the time it takes to press an autodial button. “Did you say express his inner truth? Well, that’s what I want to do too. That’s why I’m here. You wanted to know, that’s why. I never thought of it like that till you used that phrase.”
“If it involves seducing him, you’d better not use precision bombing—it tends to antagonize. Try a little sympathy. Try taking him seriously. He’s the one with the guts to have the surgery—give him a little credit.”
A pause. “Has he really never had sex? How old is he?”
“Twenty-two, and I’m busy.” I hang up, then turn off the phone and go to lunch.
When I check with the telephone company, I am given the number of Nok’s family home. Now I hesitate. After all, she died because of me — how easy will it be to face her people? I decide to check the apartment first.
The address is way out of town, quite near the new airport, which is not yet open. When I arrive in a cab, after more than an hour stuck in traffic on Sukhumvit 101,I realize that she lived in a standard one-room accommodation in a project intended as a dormitory for airport drudges. The apartment building is designed much like a prison, with ten-by-fourteen-foot cells giving onto an internal corridor. She lived on the fifth floor, which is the top, and there is no lift. The doors of the cells are secured by means of crude padlocks, but when I arrive at Nok’s, I see that her door is open. I knock anyway and enter. Five people are in the room, including a couple in their midfifties who must be her parents, a young man in his early twenties, a young woman who may be still in her teens, and a boy about seven years old. There is nothing else in the tiny room apart from a futon and some women’s clothes on hangers that are hooked over a length of molding. My eyes fixate on the boy for a moment; I hope he is not Nok’s son. In her conversations she never mentioned she had a child. “I am Detective Jitpleecheep,” I say.
There is no hope at all in the five sets of eyes that stare at me. As a rule, cops don’t offer it. There is fear in the mother’s and daughter’s expressions, anger in that of the son. Neither the father nor the grandson seems to understand what is going on. I say, “May I ask why you’re here?”
“Our cousin called us—he lives downstairs. He told us some men brought our daughter here on a stretcher last night, and he could see that she was dead. Then some other men came to take her away. We don’t know where she is.” It is the mother who spoke. Now the brother: “She was our only hope. She kept us alive. What will we do now?”
Suddenly they all seem to be silently accusing me. I have to admit there is some justice in that. As a rule, fifty percent of problems suffered by the lower income levels are caused by cops.
“She was a good girl,” her mother says. “She didn’t sell drugs, and she didn’t sell her body. She worked in a restaurant.” I look at the young boy without asking the obvious question. “Nok was married to his father, legally, but he found another wife and stopped sending child support.”
“I see,” I say. Of course, there is no way Nok could have kept five or more human beings alive on wages from a restaurant job, but protocol requires these necessary illusions. Maybe only the mother is smart enough to realize what Nok really did for money. Certainly no one in the family would ever have discussed the matter out loud. Without breaking the omerta, though, it is difficult to discuss the case.
“She sent home ten thousand baht a month,” her mother explains, “and I have to feed all of us plus my parents on that. We spend all our time growing rice to eat. We have no cash at all. My mother has diabetes. We get her drugs cheap on the government system, but she needs a special diet. My father has health problems too—something is wrong with his brain from farming in the heat all his life. My son here wanted to finish high school, but we didn’t have the money. My younger daughter here is a virgin, but she meets only local boys who have no money and usually drink whiskey and do drugs. Nok wanted to help her find a good husband, but she needs to finish high school as well or only LoSo men will look at her. Nok said she was pretty enough to find a farang husband in a year or so, when she might come here to Krung Thep. Nok said farang have so much money, one man would keep us all. Now what will we be, just beggars?”
I see my own family here. Thank Buddha my mother had the smarts and the ruthlessness to get out for long enough to make a pile— and start a brothel of her own: nobody escapes the cycle of karma, not even a Buddha.
Now the brother speaks. “Our cousin thinks it was cops who brought her and took her away again. We think maybe some rich man used her and killed her, then paid off the cops.” He stares at me accusingly.
“I know that she was killed,” I say. “I don’t think she was sexually assaulted.”
Now the father speaks. I recognize him as a type who might be termed the backbone of our country. He speaks slowly, carefully, and very politely, in a voice that has never told a lie. “We are a devout family. We give so much to the wat for tambun. Nok also made merit whenever she could, even here in Krung Thep. I have worked the fields all my life. When I was young, I ordained for a whole year. When I die, I will go to nirvana. I do not want to think about my daughter being killed by a bad man. It makes me feel crazy.” As he speaks, he holds his head between thick calloused hands and twists it one way then another. The gesture somehow completes my feeling of helplessness. I want to say that I will hunt down Nok’s killer and bring him to justice, like you hear in the movies, but I doubt even this unworldly family would believe that. Gentle they may be, but they have already absorbed and discarded Nok’s murder; what they want is some security for the future, some substitute for their only breadwinner. There is no tragedy that compares to an interminable tomorrow without rice. The mother seems to have followed my thoughts.