The Bangkok Asset: A novel (11 page)

“So what, you found prints?”

“Not prints. The bomb experts were able to find traces of liquid petroleum gas. I organized a raid and there were traces on their clothes.”

I glanced at the Sergeant, who was developing deep religious feelings for the two carved monks I’d brought him and listening to the conversation at the same time.

“That’s pretty good news. Wow! You really work fast. You did all that in less than forty-eight hours.” I heard the purring of an ambitious young man on the other phone. “So where is the bad news in all that?”

“They retained Lord Sakagorn.”

“Sakagorn?”

The Sergeant perked up for a moment, then returned to his reverie.

“Yes.”

I let a couple of beats pass. “I see. So did you get a confession, any kind of statement?”

“No. Sakagorn found holes in the way I obtained the warrant. It’s true, I cut a few corners—how was I to know they’d instruct him? He thinks up legal points even the judges have never heard of. He sent one of his assistants to the station to argue, orally and in writing, that there is no power in any of the police statutes and decrees that enables us to hold those suspects. All our evidence was obtained illegally, according to Sakagorn. What do I know? Everybody skipped those courses at the academy. The instructors didn’t know the law either.”

I scratched my jaw, remembering my own year as a cadet. Law was not big on the syllabus. “I see.”

“Detective,” the young detective said in a low tone, “should I be scared?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Please advise me.”

“Let’s look at it both ways. Say you decide to take on Lord Sakagorn and prosecute. You will be bombarded with offers of wealth and rapid advancement if you play ball, and threats of dire consequences if you don’t. In the unlikely event that you win against him in court and get a conviction, he won’t rest until he has used his influence to destroy your career. He’ll find a way to discredit you and win on appeal. If, on the other hand, you play ball with Sakagorn, then kiss your freedom and integrity goodbye, he will own you for life.”

On the other end of the phone I heard the sharp gasp of a young man who had just entered the last initiation, the one where you finally admit there is no way out. My mood altered when he started to cry.

“I knew it would be like this. They warned me, but I believed in my karma and the teachings of the Buddha. They said that I was like a white sheet that would be dipped in black dye every day. From white I would go to dirty white, to gray—in the end, I would be pure black. But I didn’t want to believe them. How have you managed, Khun Sonchai, all these years? You are famous for not taking money.”

“Even preserving one’s soul requires a certain amount of wriggling, Khun Tassatorn. Innocence can’t save you all on its own, it needs help from experience.”

“Yes. I can see that. Do you want the bombing case? Are you saying this to enhance your career?”

“I don’t want it at all. My career cannot be enhanced. I have a reputation, like you say, for not taking money, career advancement is blocked for me. You still have a chance, you’re young and ambitious, it’s just bad luck you got landed with this. You are more than welcome to keep the case, if you like.”

“I’m not crying for my career, Khun Sonchai, I’m crying for Thailand.”

“I know, Khun Tassatorn. What would you like me to do?”

“Take the case, Khun Sonchai. My chief will find a way of transferring it to District 8 if Colonel Vikorn wants it. Colonel Vikorn gets what Colonel Vikorn wants, everyone knows that. Now we’ve talked I know you are so much stronger than I. Perhaps only you could take on a case like this and survive. But please answer one question: why are you so interested in this particular matter? To tell you the truth, I never would have worked so hard if you had not inspired me with your overwhelming passion, rushing off to the hospital like that to visit those old men. I’ve never seen anything like it. When I asked people if Khun Sonchai Jitpleecheep was like this on all his cases, they told me no, normally you were not the kind of cop who always gets his man. Normally you were very reasonable and laid-back, they told me.”

I was not sure how to answer. Why did I rush off to see those three unconscious men? It was the photos on the cell phone of course. Someone takes a hundred pictures of you, the hungry heart assumes it must be love. Curious how the spirit moves.

“I’m not especially interested in the case, Detective. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other, plodding along. I’ve always found that to be the safest.”

“Is that what you advise?”

The trouble with innocence: it tries to recruit someone who has lost it to help retain it. “I don’t advise anything at all, Khun Tassatorn. War is always a balance between wanting to win and needing to survive.”

A long pause. “War. Yes, that’s the one thing they don’t tell you in the academy. From the first day on the beat, you’re at war. And you start thinking like someone in the middle of a battle that never ends.” His voice turned bitter. “You start to think like a cornered rat.”

I let the moment pass.

“It’s not only police work that’s like that,” I said. “My wife is an unemployed academic and she feels pretty much the same way.”

He grunted. I gave him time to recover. Now he changed tack.

“Yes, please take the case. You are braver and tougher than I’ll ever be.”

“There’s no need to talk like that, Khun Tassatorn. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning. I was in the same position as you once.”

“No,” he said with some finality. “In the morning I will not feel better. In the morning I will resign and ordain as a monk. It was the vocation I should have chosen in the first place. I was not made for this world. I’m not built of steel like you. What do you say to that?”

“If you really do it, I shall envy you.”

“Then I will do it,” he said, and closed the phone. I put my own back in my pocket.

“You didn’t talk about those photos of you on the cell phones,” Sergeant Lotus Bud said out of the corner of his mouth.

Throughout my conversation with Tassatorn, the Sergeant’s head had sagged farther and farther to one side until it was resting on his shoulder and he had appeared to be asleep. I shook my head. My street smarts simply did not compare with his.

“He didn’t mention it.”

“Scared,” LB said. “Those pix I found are the real reason he’s giving you the case.”

“Those pictures of me on that iPhone? So how do you explain them?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Lotus Bud said. “But that young blond guy knew all about those old guys, who had been dealing dope for a year. In that time you learn a lot about the business.” He raised a droopy eyebrow to look at me. “You learn what a lot of us have heard over the grapevine.”

“Like what?”

“Like stories about a certain respected detective with a weakness for weed who helps to run his mother’s bar on Soi Cowboy. You would have been the answer to their prayers if they could have first taken you on as a client, then maybe persuaded you to help with sales contacts. That way they would have had cast-iron protection—that’s the way they would have seen it. It’s the way Asia works, and they knew that. Don’t tell me that didn’t cross your mind?”

I sighed and took out a five-hundred-baht note to slip under the can of Nescafé on the shrine to the household gods.

“Of course it crossed my mind,” I lied.

The Sergeant used his cell phone to call a cab. I heard him tell the driver to put the ride on the Sergeant’s own bill. He was quite emotional when we said goodbye, I assumed because we’d bonded while drunk. Or perhaps he thought I didn’t have much time left in this body. Just before the cab drew away he said, “Of course, that wouldn’t explain a hundred photos. It would explain the connection but not the photos.”

“That’s right.”

He grunted. “And it wouldn’t explain why the phone came to me via that young
farang
killer.” He scratched his beard. “Not every mystery has a solution—which is okay, solutions can be dangerous.”

“Yes.”

“There’s one other thing, though. I’m surprised you didn’t ask about it.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I don’t speak English worth a damn and that young American only had basic Thai.”

Now I knew I was losing my skill set. Why didn’t I think of that? “So how did you communicate?”

“Khmer. Same as I used with the old Americans, before they mastered Thai. I was brought up in Surin. Khmer was the local dialect.”

“He was fluent?”

“Spoke it like a native. Better than me. The Surin dialect is pretty basic, but he spoke the real thing without accent.”

In the back of the cab on the way home, with no fellow human to distract me, the mind returns to primal chaos. I am like a tower of billiard balls that miraculously remained vertical for a moment and now collapses as I knew I would.
Why me?
is the question everyone asks at this point in a breakdown. I go over the three curses for the thousandth time: Nong X, murdered, my name on the mirror; an iPhone with one name in the Contacts application and a hundred photos of me; another cell phone with three more photos of me. None of this should have destroyed my sense of self were there not the haunting possibility that one of those Americans in the hospital, all of whom are naturalized Cambodians, may be my father and the looming conviction that we are all implicated in something bigger than a murder and a son in search of a dad.

When I arrive at the hovel Chanya is awake and working at her desk. I enter and press my back against the door before succumbing to the tremble-and-blurt phase of mental disintegration. At first she wants to carry on working; then she decides that as my lifelong companion she may have a part to play in my despair; then, as I blurt with ever greater rapidity, trying to pierce her shell, she gets up, takes my hand, and has me sit in her chair while she squats in front of me.

“But these are two totally unrelated issues, work and personal issues, all mixed up,” she explains in a tone that scrupulously avoids sentimentality. “You need to distinguish them.”

“How?”

“Well, work is real, and all this lost-father stuff is just something that’s been hanging there rotting in the back of your mind forever.”

I stare wild-eyed at her, failing to comprehend her total lack of comprehension. Then she remembers she once did a course on what might be termed first-response therapy:
Cries for Help and How to React to Them.
She suddenly assumes a care-and-concern expression (wide and worried eyes, furrowed brow, social-worker buzzwords, physical contact to provide the illusion of warmth, nauseating patience). When she starts to wipe my brow, hold my hand, and gaze earnestly into my eyes, it pisses me off so much I pull out of it and push her away. Am I alone in preferring madness to therapy? She now stands up in a flash of anger.

“So, have you spoken to your mother about any of this?” she snaps.

“Any of what? Decapitation? Transhumanism? Geopolitics?”

“That’s all professional stuff, that isn’t what’s bothering you. It’s the illusory connection between you and those three Americans: you have transferred your personal id onto what should be superego preoccupied with work and contribution to society—I’m using old vocabulary here, but the ideas are basically the same today as in the time of Freud.”

“Huh?”

“
Of course none of those old
farang
are your father.
That’s a classic transference from fantasy to reality. The reason there were photos of you on that old cell phone was just as Lotus Bud said: they heard you were a smoker and a cop and wanted you as a client.”

“So what about the hundred pictures on the iPhone? What about my name on the mirror in blood?”

She waves a hand. “Stuff like that can always be explained, once the whole picture is clear.” I see from her face that it is quite a while since she did the course. She is not totally sure she is following the right tack. “Clearly, the father thing is at the root of all this. I’m going to speak to your mother tomorrow. Perhaps some kind of intervention is what you need.”

That seems to have exhausted the twenty-first century’s reservoir of compassion. I’m happier when she reverts to a more primitive technique. She gives me a big smacker on the lips, jiggles my dick in a friendly way, grins right into my face, and says, “What about that oil Krom gave you? How are you supposed to smoke it?”

I sag with relief: whatever the issues between us, we are both big fans of self-medication. Now Chanya is intrigued by the idea of dipping a couple of cigarettes in the oil, then baking the cigarettes at hundred degrees centigrade for fifteen minutes until the solvent has burned off, leaving, in theory, pure THC stuck to the tobacco fibers. Neither of us have smoked this way before and we have no idea what to expect. We bake two Marlboros, one each, lie on the mattress with a makeshift ashtray on either side, smile at each other, and light up.

So far as I can recall I was a third of the way through my own little ciggy when I found important information to share with Chanya.
This stuff is really strong,
is what I wanted to say, but the words came out so garbled that even I could not understand them. It didn’t matter, for Chanya was lying dead straight, arms rigidly by her side, her eyes firmly fixed on the Invisible. Eventually she roused herself enough to say, “Krom’s oil is very strong,” and returned to heaven. For myself, while I felt in full control of my mind, my facial and tongue muscles were a different matter. The couple of syllables I attempted seemed garbled; I could not understand what I was trying to say. And so we lay on our backs, the two of us, for quite a few hours, our bodies touching, our souls a cosmos apart. From time to time during the course of the night I returned to earth to take a glance at Chanya, who remained rigid, bug-eyed, and enthralled by my side.

K
rom sent separate SMSs to Chanya and me to remind us that we were invited to supper tonight. In the cab on the way to Heaven’s Gate Tower, generally known as the HGT, Chanya suffers from an attack of nerves. Despite her former success as a hostess and escort, it has been a while since she worked.

“It’s going to be awkward, isn’t it?”

“How so?”

“You must have thought about it. This invitation comes from on high, through Vikorn’s PRC connections. Vikorn has let this Professor Chu think he’s going to lay a dazzlingly attractive inspector who is also a high-tech whiz kid—a woman totally up his alley—all on the Colonel’s tab. It’s one of those male transactions in which women are the currency, don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

“Women aren’t the currency, lust is. It’s like the Buddha said, it’s lust, fear, or indifference with humankind.”

“That’s right,” she says with a grin. I still admire the way she can flip her moods in a second. She has flown across an internal abyss like a lama, now she’s on the other side, laughing. “On that retreat I went on two years ago, we turned it into an exercise. We used the imagery of a clock face with an arrow and three positions: attraction, aversion, indifference. In our meditations we had to observe which one the arrow was pointing at, from second to second. Then from split second to split second. The arrow moves automatically according to the thoughts in your head, there’s no control. In the end the whole universe amounts to that: lust, fear, boredom. Unless you’re enlightened.”

She looks me in the eye. “I called her. I forgot to tell you?”

“Krom? Today?”

“Yes. After you went to work. There have been rumors. There were a bunch of cops from your police station at the
khao kha moo
stall when you were having that intense little chat together that lasted quite a while. I called to tell her about the gossip. She apologized and said there was nothing between you. I said I knew that. It was one of those totally civilized girls-being-tidy things.”

I’m amazed and stare at her. “How the hell—?”

“Pi Tai told me. You know, she runs the typing pool. I’m not totally without sources.”

“Really?”

“Cops are just amazing gossips—the men more than the women.” She looked me in the eyes. “It’s okay, I know she doesn’t fancy you, she probably couldn’t get wet for a man anyway. Lust, aversion, indifference. When she looks at you her arrow points to indifference. When she looks at me it points to lust. When you look at her your arrow points to fear. You’re scared of her.”

“Why?”

“She’s smarter than you.”

I let that pass. “And you—where is your arrow pointing, these days?”

She holds my hand for a moment, as if to soften a blow. “I’ve been stuck on indifference for too long, Sonchai. I’ve done it for you. You marry a man to tame him, because his virility scares and unsettles you. Allowing yourself to be tamed in turn is only fair, part of the deal. So you end up with two very tame humans. Apparently Mother Nature set it up that way. But I can’t keep it up, darling. I really can’t. And neither can you.” She removes her hand and looks out of the window. “You do know where your arrow points when you look at me?” It’s my turn to look out the window. She pronounces the word softly, tenderly, kindly, deftly: “Boredom.” The moment hangs. “There is something about Inspector Krom that seems to offer a cure, isn’t there?”

“She’s dangerous.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Sometimes the only way out of a conversation is to take it somewhere else. “I don’t think I’ve come across a brain like hers before,” I say. “I’m going to feel sorry for the Professor if he thinks he’s going to sleep with her tonight—or ever.”

“Should I give him the come-on instead? Would it be good for your investigation? I wouldn’t have to fuck him, I could just string him along until you told me to stop. Maybe that’s the only contribution I can make.”

I groan. “For Buddha’s sake, Chanya. Please.”

She laughs again, that free and troubling lama laugh from the other side of the abyss.

We emerge from the lift lobby and look up: Orion and his belt; the Big Dipper; bit of Moon; Pegasus. Whichever poet first called it a
black velvet canopy encrusted with diamonds
was right: you can’t improve on that, although in the tropics it can also resemble a wet blanket with holes in it. Chanya is charmed. She stares into the heavens, willing a crew of aliens to send a ladder for her to climb up.

We were the first to arrive. Stars aside, it was a bar so expensive and successful it could afford to place its tables far apart. Baristas—all men—wore quick-draw holsters where electronic menus and credit card machines nestled. They were intense, focused, professionally polite, and quite ruthless in pursuit of a place in the mixologist’s (do
not
call them barmen) hall of fame. Trained by aliens and very un-Thai, in other words. We ordered a couple of piña coladas, because that’s what we order in bars like this, checked out the other customers: a group of young upper-middle-class New Yorkers getting louder drink by drink; a blond couple sipping white wine who looked German; a Chinese couple probably from Hong Kong; a British family, obviously wealthy, with a teenage son and daughter. Now a single Chinese man appeared and the maître d’ ushered him to our table. Chanya and I stood up.

First thing I have to report, R: he was tall. No one was expecting
tall.
Well, you don’t, do you, when you’re told you will meet a Chinese professor who works out of offices in Shanghai? Let us be honest here about our species-wide addiction to stereotypes: short, plump, mid-fifties with male pattern baldness was the first image that came to mind, not a five-eleven northerner in his early forties, lean with strong harmonious features like a film star and a full head of jet-black hair coiffed by an expert. This only created another layer of complexity. Suddenly Krom might not be the victim of cynical male humor; she might be the evening’s big winner. Except that she was a dyke, of course.

“Detective Jitpleecheep? I’m Chu.” He turned chivalrously to Chanya, to whom he offered a Hollywood smile, circa 1950. This was going to be an interesting evening. Chanya mastered herself to return a finely honed smile designed to acknowledge his beauty and importance without in any way compromising her status as a chaste married woman. Of course, it was just a posture and we were not legally married and her pupils were opened a little wider than was entirely appropriate considering she had known the newcomer for less than a minute, but
face
is everything in the East. When we sat and he looked expectantly at the empty chair, Chanya, now on her best behavior, told him that “Ms. Krom will be here any minute.”

Now our vulgar piña coladas with the great hairy lumps of pineapple sticking out of extravagant glasses with cocktail sticks sporting white paper hats seemed
bannock,
or country bumpkin, especially when he ordered a
coupe
of Dom Perignon—vintage, naturally.

Then it was nothing but small talk until the other star arrived. The Professor had studied trivia, probably as a survival skill essential in cultures without depth or mahjong, and was horribly good at it. He tried us out with politics, philosophy, and economics, then slipped naturally into Chanya’s preference for women’s issues: is the West actually
behind
China?

Chu was too sophisticated to give a standard-issue critique of the hypocrisy and double-talk of the Western model that had never done better than half deliver on any of its promises to anyone, ever, especially its own people—although he hinted as much. He dealt instead with the conflict in China between the modernizers, who are the survivors and inheritors of Mao’s revolution, and the closet imperialists who secretly assume that China will return to its former splendor, decadence, and inequality; indeed has already done so in Shanghai and Beijing and all along the east coast. Did we know there already existed a breed of wealthy merchants who have stopped cutting their fingernails to prove they never do manual work, just like under the Empress Dowager? Chu balanced the various arguments skillfully, taking care not to omit anything relevant even if prejudicial to his case, then concluded that, yes, China is streets ahead of the West in terms of women’s issues—and most of the other issues, too, although he conceded a certain attitude problem when it came to pollution. Now Krom arrived.

Who ever would have guessed? She came as Charlie Chaplin. Well, that was my first thought, because of the hat. It was not a bowler—not quite—but that kind of shape, pushed rakishly back. I had to admit it went well with the pearl satin shirt and trademark bootlace tie, the black pantaloons and the laddish lace-up black boots, but it was the hat that said,
Careful, I’m different.
I was proud of her. Chanya, though, felt upstaged. The exclusive eye contact she had enjoyed with the handsome professor had now to be shared with this startling and fascinating newcomer. She tried, but could not compete with the hat. Our eyes met. She looked away.

To make matters worse, Krom, who I’d considered incapable of small talk, immediately opened up the conversation by referring to the Jade Rabbit. BTW, R,
Jade Rabbit
was the Chinese Moon buggy who kept a diary on the PRC’s social media sites. The poor thing ran out of energy while stranded on the Dark Side and left his two billion fans in Greater China with a touching farewell message:

If this journey must come to an early end, I am not afraid. Whether or not the repairs are successful, I believe even my malfunctions will provide my masters with valuable information and experience.

That did sound a tad like the heroic self-sacrifice of early communist mythology, and I was waiting to see how the very urbane Chu would respond.

“Believe me,” he said to Krom with a smile, “I despise Chinese infantilism as much as you probably do. But Jade Rabbit has been a great success with the masses—like Mickey Mouse in the West. Except that JR is doing a real job. That must constitute progress, no? Imagine a world where Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, Mickey and Minnie actually do something useful instead of mindlessly beating each other up?”

“That’s so true,” Chanya said.

“So much depends on how technology hits the private citizen,” the Professor explained. “Computing power among the masses is already extraordinary—there was a degree of paranoia about that in the Party, but it turns out the little people prefer to share porn, gossip, and insults and listen to junk music. It’s a fantastic way of shutting them up, like a voluntary electronic gulag. No danger at all except from organized Islamists.”

Chanya had now decided she didn’t like the Professor after all, and took this last statement as clear indication of his male chauvinist totalitarian soul, which, she had already intuited, was not attracted to her anyway. Krom, though, looked at it differently. She agreed that the amount of computing power out there among the people as a whole was amazing—like a source of uranium nobody has yet seen how to harness. Suppose, for example, a village of a couple thousand people all linked up their computers in pursuit of a common cause? Of course, when that does happen, the world will cease to be recognizable.

It was conversation as cover, in other words. Krom had the attention of the alpha male that Chanya had lost, despite the fact that Krom didn’t want it. For my part I did not banish from my mind the possibility that the irresistible Professor might be hors de combat by reason of being gay. He didn’t give a single clue about which way he swung until, at the end of the meal when the ladies went off to the bathroom together, he changed seats and shifted closer to me than is normal at this kind of supper and began to whisper sweet nothings in my ear.

The sweet nothings, though, were yet another cover in this hall of mirrors. In between seductive smiles along with a hand placed on my shoulder, he managed to convey a quite different message. I confess I had not noticed the arrival of two Chinese men during the course of the meal who had installed themselves at the far end of the restaurant on seats facing us.

“They’re from the ministry,” he whispered. “I wonder if you would help me lose them?”

I used my best quick flick to take them in. My mind went back to that morning on the river. “Are they photographers?” I asked.

“They’ve been using miniature video cameras all night. They’re the latest, better than anything the West has. Quite invisible unless you know what to look for.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Pat Pong—but I don’t dare with them on my tail.”

“No problem,” I said and took out my cell phone to call Sergeant Ruamsantiah.

“No problem,” the Sergeant said. “I’ll call Colonel Wanakan. He’ll have a couple of his boys check their passports when they leave the restaurant. Where are you?”

“Heaven’s Gate Tower.”

“I went there once. Hated it.”

“The food?”

“No. The height. It gave me vertigo.”

But on the way to Pat Pong the Professor received a phone call that altered all our plans. I watched the change in his expression as someone spoke on the other end of the line: playtime postponed, this was a work moment; adulthood returned with a thump. “Tell the driver to go to this address,” he said to Krom in the back of the cab, using a stern tone we’d not heard before. “We’re going to a demo,” he told us.