by John Burdett
He looks down at the saffron pile, then at me. “I’m a second child, Detective. I follow leads. What should I do?”
“Put your robes back on, Phra Titanaka. It’s against the rules to disrobe yourself. Only the Sangha can do that.”
I leave him, descend the crude wooden stairs, cross the compound to my own hut, and try to prepare my mind for another unbearable day in the oven. From the shade of my hut I gaze on Gamon’s closed door, wondering what kind of monster is rebirthing there, its hour come round at last.
36
Yesterday another event occurred to disrupt the terminal boredom. Some of the Khmer decided to liven things up by killing one of the elephants, which, after the death of Baker, was superfluous. It was possible to understand much of what they intended by watching their body language and the smirks on their faces. They spoke to the mahout, who remonstrated with them. He seemed to be telling them they were crazy, that this was a very bad thing to do, that no good could come of it. They laughed at him and took out their machine guns. They fired from the safety of a hut, straight across the compound, ripping through the elephant’s skull, chopping off its trunk. Its great strength kept it alive for more than an hour after they stopped shooting. They were fascinated by the anguished groans of the other two animals, the way they came to sniff at their dying brother and comfort him with their trunks, all the time making heart-wrenching noises of dumb distress. The KR thought it hilarious.
In late afternoon they were asleep on the balcony of the hut when the animals attacked. One of the Khmer managed to escape. Smith, Tanakan, and I watched while the animals destroyed the hut as well as the remaining human in a fantastic orgy of primal rage, snorting and honking furiously, masters again at last. Within minutes there was no more than splinters, bones, and blood and a pile of firewood where the hut had been. The two giants tossed wooden beams around with their trunks and stabbed at the dead Khmer with their tusks in wild downward thrusts—a quite superfluous expression of vengeance considering they had already stamped on his chest. The remaining Khmer thought this hilarious also. Tanakan and Smith turned gray; I expect I did too.
It’s shocking how quickly we all got used to the new reality: a hut in splinters, an elephant carcass in the middle of the compound, human remains among the firewood already starting to stink. Survival on earth is our true god, or we would have migrated to less challenging planets millennia ago. We are all savages now, Smith, Tanakan, and me, by virtue of our acceptance of the barbarism. I’m not so sure about Gamon, who did not emerge from his hut all day today, not even in the midst of the shooting, screaming, yelling, and laughing. We have made even the animals hate us.
When I finally took a look at the hut the elephants had destroyed, I saw a couple of sacks of yaa baa in powder form. I had seen the Khmer licking their fingers from time to time but had not paid it any mind. Typical of them, they did not measure the amount of the drug they were using but simply wet their fingers and stuck them into a sack of the stuff whenever they felt their high beginning to wane.
The elephant rebellion did have the effect, however, of concentrating the minds of the remaining Khmer. All of a sudden they went to work manfully on the bamboo balls, and by the end of the day they were ready. I watched, as no doubt Smith and Tanakan watched, while they rolled them out into the open area between the huts, tested them for durability, and checked the hinged hatches they had installed. Two of them went to the window of Smith’s hut to check his size against the ball they had built for him, which is quite a bit bigger than Tanakan’s. That exercise complete, they returned to their own huts and watched. Little by little, I suppose, the gaze of everyone came to rest on Gamon’s closed door.
Hours have passed. I have come to recognize every subtlety of heat. The fierce sudden heat of the morning is quite different in texture from the relentless heat of midday, which is different again from the sullen molten copper of late afternoon. It is, I guess, about four P.M. when I notice a shuddering in the structure of Gamon’s flimsy hut, signifying that he is moving around. Finally the door opens slowly, and it remains so for a full five minutes before the human form emerges.
I know I inhale sharply, and I bet everyone else does too, when the figure in a black ballgown and a wig of long black Asian hair begins to walk sedately down the stairs. You would need to be in the grip of some Western superstition to suppose that this new creature is simply a gifted transvestite. I don’t think any of us believe that, except maybe the English lawyer Smith. It is Damrong in every movement, every gesture, down to the last nuance. Goose bumps have erupted on both my forearms and the back of my neck is rigid; in the unendurable heat I am frozen to the spot. Appalled and fascinated, I wait for the first words to emerge from those lips that she has enriched with purple lipstick.
She crosses the compound elegantly with a beautifully straight back, not a trace of exaggeration in the seductive swing of her buttocks. “It’s time,” she calls out in that soft, compelling voice. Astonished and profoundly impressed, the Khmer stand and roll out the giant bamboo balls. “Bring the prisoners,” Damrong commands; it is her voice. She has spoken in Khmer, but there is no doubt about her meaning.
“No!” I yell in an involuntary outburst, and stand up.
She turns toward me curiously, daring me to meet her gaze. This I am unable to do. No matter how hard I try, I cannot bring myself to look into those eyes. “Hello, Sonchai,” she says in a mock-seductive tone. “Have you eaten yet?” Struck dumb, I shake my head. “Look at me, lover. Look into my eyes.” Again I shake my head like a village idiot. “Aren’t you pleased to see me, darling?”
“Wha, wha, wha,” I start to jabber. “What have you done to Gamon?”
She smiles. “Just like you to ask the most difficult question. Do you love him more than you love me? I think you do. Why Sonchai, he’s in the hut meditating. Why don’t you go and say hello?”
If I was scared before, I’m suffering a paralyzing extreme of terror now. At this moment I think that nothing in the world would induce me to walk over to Gamon’s hut—except for one thing. “Go to the hut, Sonchai,” she commands, “or look into my eyes.” She takes a step toward me, leaning her head to one side, as if to force me to meet her gaze. I turn away and find myself making toward the hut.
I climb the rickety stairs slowly, with more than an inkling of what I might expect. Sure enough, when I enter, he is all dressed up in his robes, sitting in a semilotus position. It is Damrong’s corpse, of course, beginning to rot and filling the hut with the stench of formaldehyde, the eyes glazed and wide open. In a strange way, everything suddenly fits. Somehow the logic of sorcery would have required her cadaver; but has she really imprisoned her brother’s spirit in that corpse? Outrageous, even for her. But at least the cadaver is immobile. I take the opportunity to rummage around until I find my cell phone, which the Khmer confiscated. I press an autodial number, and Kimberley answers, “Where are you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Drama?”
“Plenty.”
“Leave this line open as long as you can. I’ll see if I can patch you over to Virginia.”
I lay the cell phone on the floor with the line to Kimberley still open, hoping the battery holds out.
Now I hear sounds of steel doors opening down in the compound. When I step out onto the balcony, I see the Khmer have tied the hands of Smith and Tanakan behind their backs and are bringing them out. Smith, with his farang addiction to logic, is able to maintain his mental balance, terrified though he is. Tanakan, on the other hand, is trembling like a child and appears to have peed into his sarong.
“Hello, lovers,” Damrong says. “Are you surprised to see me?” She walks elegantly up to them and caresses Smith’s face with one hand.
“Fucking pervert,” Smith says.
Damrong responds with that cynical-joyful laugh of hers that I remember so well. “Tom, Tom, you always did miss the point. That’s why you’re in this mess. If only you’d been born A
sian, you would have understood so much better.” He turns his head away from her and spits. I have to admire the way he has found his courage again. But he won’t have it for long, I fear. “If you’re so sure I’m just a screwed-up pervert in drag, why don’t you look into my eyes, Tom? Please, do that little thing for me.”
I see that he too cannot bear to meet her gaze. The idea is profoundly counterintuitive, like an animal’s fear of fire. She reaches out to hold his jaw. “Call me a ‘fucking pervert’ again, Tom, please.”
Something has happened to his identity. He would like to show true British spirit at a time like this, but he cannot. She is destroying his center, that complex, contradictory, illusory, but vitally necessary idea of self, without which we are no more than helpless infants. She nods to the Khmer, who have melted into her slaves. One of them holds Smith’s head, while another tries to keep his lids from closing. I cannot help my fascination as she takes one step closer to him and stares directly into his retinas. I am thinking, No, no, you cannot do that. You cannot bring a virgin soul into contact with the other side without preparation. You will destroy more than his body.
The effect is electric, as if he has been whipped. Suddenly he is a limp rag, a shadow, all autonomy lost. I turn away as he bursts into tears. He is blubbering something that sounds a little like “Mother,” but it is hard to be sure. She has raped him.
She turns away from him in contempt and steps toward Tanakan, who starts to speak rapidly in Thai. I strain to catch his words, which are incomprehensible until I realize he is listing his assets, all of them—mansions, palaces, islands, gold, stocks, shares—offering them to her, begging her to accept them, at the same time painfully aware that he doesn’t have anything the dead might need. He is using terms of address normally reserved for royalty and Buddhas. No Caucasian resistance here, he has accepted the new reality without reservation. “I will build a temple to you,” he is saying. “Your name and image will be worshiped. I am a billionaire—for me such things are easy to accomplish.”
She laughs gaily and says something in Khmer. It is not difficult to understand, because the guards start to take Smith and Tanakan toward the bamboo balls.
I try to think of the most far-fetched, illogical solution, the one thing Aristotle would never have considered in a million years. Revolted though I am, I know I have to go back inside the hut.
It takes only a minute to undress the cadaver. I change quickly into the saffron robes; then, trying not to gag or to fixate on the hideous Y-shaped gash in her torso, I pick her up (she is much lighter without her internal organs) and make for the door, grabbing Gamon’s Kalashnikov and at the same time picking up the butane lighter that he used to light his candles.
Unaccustomed to the robes, or to carrying a corpse for that matter, I stumble on the stairs, but no one pays any attention. A primal orgy of sadism is in progress, and everyone is enthralled to watch the Khmer bind Smith’s and Tanakan’s feet, then force the two men into fetal position and bind them further like hogs. Tanakan is smaller and therefore easier to force through the hatch into one of the balls. His face is closed tightly like a fist when I reach the compound. Still nobody notices me as I set down the cadaver, take out the lighter, and apply the flame to the cadaver’s left pinkie.
Damrong now lets out a diabolical oath and turns around, at the same time shaking her left hand exactly as if she has accidentally burned it. She is incredulous to see me, the holy fool, in Phra Titanaka’s robes. But I am pointing the gun at the head of the corpse.
Any vestigial notion that there might be a rational explanation, or that “A cannot be not-A,” is quite erased by the way she flies through the air toward me (she adopts the diagonal like a banking helicopter, about ten feet from the ground, black hair flying wild, no broomstick), her face distorted with rage. In the circumstances I feel I have no choice but to pull the trigger on the cadaver. In the far distance I believe I can detect the sound of rotor blades.
It is not the approaching helicopter (somehow I knew the FBI would find a black one) that freaks the Khmer, though—it’s the sorcery. Even as the chopper circles above the compound, the thugs are fleeing into the jungle, taking the mahout and the elephants with them. Somewhat disheveled, I fear, and not managing the robes very well at all, I walk toward the figure in the black ballgown lying facedown a few yards from me. The wig has fallen off. When I turn him over, he is still breathing, but there is a terrible head wound in the region of his left temple, where I shot the cadaver. He opens his eyes, though, and seems to recognize me. I cradle his shaved head in my hands.
“She’s gone, I can feel it, she’s gone for good,” he says with a smile. Then: “Whatever you do, don’t save my life.”
“Of course not,” I reply. “Of course not, Phra Titanaka.”
“I was a real monk, Sonchai. If I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have felt so much pain, would I?”
“You were born a monk, my friend.”
He smiles at that. “I scaled the heights, Detective, I really did. People don’t realize how available nirvana is. I experienced total love, the cosmic power of compassion, Buddha mind, but I could never sustain it. Too many previous wasted lifetimes, all of them spent with her. She was too strong for me. I wanted so much to save her. I thought if I became a monk, a serious one, and transformed myself, then she would have to follow. But she had other ideas. She always did things her way.”
I think he wants to say more, but he fades away at that moment.
I drag myself over to the bamboo balls. Tanakan is snugly inside his, but the terrified Khmer dropped Smith outside the other one. From within his lattice womb Tanakan has recovered his nerve and starts to demand that I get him out. I stare at him for a moment, frown, then go over to Smith. “I need a cell phone,” I tell him, but he is not responsive. I have to climb back up to Gamon’s hut to retrieve my own, but the battery has run down. Never mind, Kimberley has jumped out of her chopper and is running toward me, combat style, dressed in black coveralls, carrying a sexy-looking two-tone carbine (café au lait on dark chocolate). “What happened?” she says, coming to an abrupt halt, not sure where to point the gun.
“Damrong’s ghost trapped her brother in her own cadaver so she could use his body while supervising the ritual slaying of those two,” I explain, pointing at Smith and Tanakan. “But I shot the cadaver in the head, which put an end to her scheme. I believe the technical expression is sympathetic magic. It’s not due to become available to humanity at large again for another thousand years. Can I borrow your cell phone?”
She hands it to me, and I plug in a familiar number. “Yamahatosan,” I say, “I have a job for you.”
Epilogue
Vikorn sent a couple of heavies to arrest me as soon as I reached Bangkok. He has thrown me into the cells while he decides what to do with me. He doesn’t know everything, but he knows enough to realize I stopped being a cop for a certain period of time, during which his squeeze on Tanakan was ruined and the sweetest scam of his life was taken from him. I know he is deciding whether to bump me off or reduce me to some degrading condition of absolute slavery. I’m not too bothered, though. After all, I have a trump up my sleeve. In the meantime I’m enjoying the solitude, the reliable rhythms of incarceration. I don’t even mind the slopping out, although the stench makes me gag; I’m using it as an exercise in Buddhist humility. After forty-eight hours, however, I’m starting to get bored, so I send the Colonel a handwritten note in Thai: : I have a video.
Never one to be coy when a glittering prize offers itself, he writes back within the hour: : What kind of video?
: Naked confessions of Khun Tanakan and Khun Smith.
My rehabilitation is as precipitous as my fall. Now I’m in Vikorn’s office, sitting opposite him.
“Want a cigar?”
“You know I don’t smoke tobacco.”
“How about some ganja? One of the boys busted a dealer with export-quality stuff. Here.” He reaches into his top drawer and tos
ses a Ziploc bag of dense green vegetation onto his desk. I wasn’t about to accept, but the deep shade of the grass, together with the superabundance of buds, weakens my resolve. As I reach for it, however, he clamps it to his desk with a heavy gnarled old hand.
“Where’s the video?”
“At a secret location.”
“Does it really show them fessing up to everything? Conspiring to make a snuff movie, taking shareholder positions, all that?”
“Yes. Naked, bent over trestles in a compromising position. It’s very elegantly done. Yammy’s come a long way.”
“Yammy? You used Yammy?”
“Is there anyone better?”
“Okay, how much do you want?”
“I want thirty percent for charity, plus tweny-five million dollars in seed money for Yammy’s feature film. It sounds like a lot, but you’re going to grab half of Tanakan’s fortune, so why should you care?”
“Show me the video first.”
“Do I look that stupid?”
“Okay, okay, if it’s as good as you say, I’ll agree.”
“Write that down. I want you on your honor.”
He frowns, then takes out his pen, writes, and hands me the contract. I fish a disk out of my pocket, walk over to his DVD player, and switch it on.
It was kind of cozy watching Yammy’s private masterpiece, which had the Colonel chortling and congratulating me. With the FBI standing next to him wearing her new gun, Yammy used two cameras to somehow make magic of a sorry tale. He made Smith and Tanakan confess slowly, deliberately, as if reciting poetry on a stark stage in front of the hut the elephants had shattered. They speak in solemn, well-modulated voices, as they recount every detail of their contract with Damrong and the morbid passion that led to it. Yammy and I used her extensive notes as a kind of film script.
