by John Burdett
They've laid Chaz Buckle out on the dockside under a blanket. The police launch is tied up to a capstan between two gigantic container vessels. The view is blocked in every direction by looming bows, rusting sterns, and iron gangplanks. Impenetrable marine shadows cast darkness over the poorly lit footpaths. Bumgrad nods to me, and I lift the blanket: a single shot in the back of the head, with exit wound that blew out his left eye. He is soggy from time spent in the river, but the assassination is recent. Even if I did not recognize the ruined face, the tattoos would have been identification enough.
"We haven't checked his pockets yet," Bumgrad murmurs. "We thought maybe you would want to do that."
I lean over the body, then jump back as a small blind eel wriggles from out his mouth. His pockets are undulating. Lek, watching closely, puts a hand over his mouth. When I rip open his shirt, I see that his stomach, too, is in perpetual motion. There is a faint pop, and a blind white head with mouth full of tiny teeth emerges from his belly button. I snap my head around-is this some kind of joke?-but Bumgrad and his men are gone, disappeared into the black maze of the dock. Lek steps back, stifling a squeal. Eels are burrowing out of the corpse, desperate to find a way back to the river. I also take ten paces back.
A whoreshriek from the bows of the container boat-sailors are a specialized market that my mother and I don't touch-then silence, save for the ring of iron-shod heels. A short stocky uniformed figure with ramrod back and voluminous chest emerges from the dark beyond and marches toward us until he is standing in a pool of light shed by a small lamp hanging from a ship's cable. I slowly get to my feet, close my hands in a wai, and raise them to my lips.
"Good evening, General Zinna," I say, carefully maintaining the wai.
Without replying, the General walks slowly toward me and stares down at the corpse. "Someone exercised compassion," he says in a whispered baritone. "They killed him before they shoved the eels up his ass. That way he didn't feel them eating his guts out. I doubt I would show such restraint toward someone who really irritated me. Know what I mean?" He raises a hand, and snaps his fingers once. There is a sound of running boots; now more than a dozen young men in black sweatshirts and army haircuts are emerging from the shadows at a jog. They stand behind him in military formation until he nods to two of them, who go over to Chaz to shine a flashlight on his belly, which is now quite eaten away with a tangle of white writhing worms. The General walks over, picks one of the eels out of Chaz's guts, deftly kills it by whipping its head against the capstan, and returns to me.
As he slides the dead eel into my trouser pocket, in hardly more than a murmur: "Tell Colonel Vikorn he's gone too far. He framed me, I got off, now the dope belongs to me. He doesn't get a second shot. I'll have his guts, one way or another." Casting a contemptuous glance at Lek: "And I'll have your bum boy, too."
He and his men turn and leave. We are alone in marine darkness with a corpse full of hungry eels. As if sensing the coast is clear, the girl at the bow of the ship shrieks and laughs again with impressive professionalism calculated to make her sailor feel powerful, predatory, irresistible, charming, and horny. It seems a secret party is under way, for a couple more girls cry out, laugh, make vulgar jokes in Thai while their men shout in Chinese. Three female faces appear over the bows, then immediately disappear.
Sudden quiet, in which the soft padding of a large rat can be heard. Far off someone is crossing the river in a long-tail boat. I decide to save the man I once interrogated from further forensic indignity, but it is not easy. He's heavy and elusive in the way of corpses. Grasping his wrists and signaling for Lek to help me, I drag him to the side of the dock, twist him around, then try to push him in. Lek leans over from the hips, elegantly failing to grasp the cadaver's feet. I'm sweating in the night heat and experiencing an irrational reluctance to make contact with the eels, which are still feasting. With a foot on one shoulder, near the neck, I give a mighty shove. His arms still outstretched, the tattoos Mother and Denise are the last of him to slide over the edge and into the river with the most discreet of splashes.
I reach into my pocket and throw Zinna's dead eel after him. Where's Lek? Frantic for a second (I experience a vision of rape and degradation at the hands of Zinna's men), I catch sight of him a little farther down the dock, in a pool of light.
The most classic of all our classical dance derives from the Hindu Ramayana, in which the god Vishnu incarnates as Rama and gets into a fight with evil over the life of his bride Sita. Lek is playing Sita on her knees pleading for her lord and master to believe in her eternal fidelity.
I put my arm around him as I lead him away. "He called me a bum boy."
"Don't worry about it."
"I'm not a bum boy, I'm a dancer."
"I know you are."
He turns his big hazel eyes onto me, merciless in his trust, love, and expectation.
When we pass the spot, we hear the ferocious churning of fish and eels that the T808 is feeding. For a tantalizing moment I see his life disperse into its many components, which spin away from one another into the night. The composite problem that was Chaz Buckle is now resolved.
24
I t seems, though, that other composites are resolving into dust and spirit this violent night. Just after I've dropped Lek off at his project, Lieutenant Manhatsirikit calls me on my mobile.
"The Colonel's at Khun Mu's house. Better get over there."
There's nothing much to say, farang, that you have not already guessed. At Khun Mu's house all the dogs and monkeys are dead (gutted), the guards executed, mostly by bullets to the skull. Khun Mu, naked, is wrapped around Joey's embalmed corpse in an obscene position, her throat cut. And there is a fat dead farang woman in her mid-forties slit from gut to chest, lying on the king-size bed in the great bedroom, wearing only a huge pair of shorts.
"Denise?" I ask Vikorn.
He nods. "She lived in a million-dollar mansion overlooking the Andaman Sea in Phuket. He kidnapped her and brought her here just to show that he could." A shaking of the head. "Just to make a point." Looking at me: "All our witnesses are dead."
Vikorn walks over to the sofa by the window and sits heavily. I've never seen him so despondent. "We've been going against him symmetrically," he mutters, "that's the problem. We can't beat him on violence. He's the army, for Buddha's sake." A quick glance at me. "I'm sorry, Sonchai. I'm taking the file away from you."
"You have someone better?"
"It needs nuance, a woman's touch."
"Manny? She's not exactly subtle."
He shrugs: no comment. He is huddled on his seat, shrunken, the very image of defeat; there are even tears in his eyes. I feel a great wave of pity-but wait! Somehow his projection of despair, frustration, misery, near-senility is a little too pat.
"Someone's come up with a Plan C, haven't they?"
He looks at me blankly as if he has no idea what I'm talking about.
At the station the next day, it is revealed that Vikorn spent the morning watching international news on his TV, which is normally dedicated to Thai pool. (He runs the main gambling syndicate.) When I go in to see him, I find him fixated by the monitor. It seems there has been a terrorist bomb in some remote village in Java, Indonesia, five Indonesian Hindus dead, about twenty more hospitalized. No one doubts the culprits are from an extreme Muslim faction, particularly because one of them died in the blast. Bits of his skullcap and beard, some fingers, a leg, and other body parts have been recovered. It is anticipated that his identity and that of the particular splinter group to which he belonged will soon be known. Naturally, the Western intelligence agencies are interested and only too willing to lend assistance.
I have no idea why Vikorn, who is hardly a fully globalized world citizen (I'm not sure he could identify France on a map), should be so interested, but when I cough with a view to attracting his attention, he raises a hand. When the news program has exhausted its real-time coverage, he lifts his telephone and-to my amazement-tells Lieutenant
Manhatsirikit to get him on the next flight to Jakarta. While he is on the way to the airport, she is to make arrangements for him to meet someone senior in the Indonesian police, with a view to "mutually beneficial information sharing." I am staring open-mouthed while he rummages around. In all my time in District 8, my Colonel has never once left Thailand's sacred soil. Now Manny arrives and scowls at me before telling him that an interpreter has been located and this person, who is fluent in whatever language they speak down there (Vikorn keeps calling it Indonesian, but both Lieutenant Manhatsirikit and I have our doubts), will meet him at the airport tomorrow. When she has left, he checks his watch. Seven p.m. "We're going to eat," he tells me, and presses an autodial number on his mobile to call his driver.
In the back of his Bentley, with "The Ride of the Valkyries" screaming from the sound system, his driver with his usual supercilious expression plastered all over his mug, my Colonel places a hand on my shoulder. "You're going to forget last night. It never happened. You're going to concentrate on the Mitch Turner case."
"At least tell me what your Plan C is."
"You might not want to know. Anyway, it's classified."
I can hardly believe my generosity of soul. I'm actually pleased he's still fighting Zinna, even if I have missed my promotion (and the hundred thousand dollars). I don't want to let him off too lightly, though; this is quite a letdown I'm dealing with. I look out the window of the Bentley as we speed along Rama IV. "For a moment I thought you were getting old."
He spares me a contemptuous glance. "You think that's all it is? A primitive vendetta between two old men?" Leaning toward me to prod me in the gut: "What I do to keep the brakes on Zinna isn't just for Ravi. It's for the country, too. Let the army run the drug trade, and you get rich generals. Rich generals get big ideas and stage coups-that was the whole problem with the opium trade. Before you know it, we're back to military rule. And what do Thai army generals know about the global economy, human rights, the rule of law, the welfare of women, the twenty-first century in general? Next time you vote in a more or less straight democratic election, think about it. Thai police may not be the world's finest, but we're not military. Under us there are free elections. No farang would understand, but I expect better from you."
He still hasn't finished. In fact, he is digging me in the ribs. "Who knows, under democracy the country might flourish until it's worthy of a refined fellow like you. But if that happens, it will be because badasses like me kept the army snout out of the feeding trough, not because some monk manque rescued a few dumb dogs off the street."
I shake my head in wonderment. He always has an answer. His dexterous use of the word manque is particularly irritating; in Thai the word has exactly the same quality of supercilious pretension and is just the sort of thing I come out with when I want to irritate him. Who told him he could say manque and get away with it?
I brood for a long moment. His driver stops at the beginning of Pat Pong, our most venerable-and famous-red-light district. There is no way the limo is going to squeeze down this crowded street at this time of night. Vikorn and I get out and walk while his chauffeur takes the car away. The Colonel is in plain clothes and looks like just another Thai man, somewhat on the short side by Western standards, indistinguishable from the other middle-aged Thai men who work this street, virtually all of whom are pimps. Vikorn seems to suffer no threat to his ego, though, when a young white tourist in cutaway singlet and walking shorts, regulation nose stud and eyebrow pin, asks him where the Ping-Pong show is. Vikorn stops in midstride and, with a smile expressive of deep greed and sympathetic lechery, points to a small sign on an upper terrace: Girls, dirty dancing, ping-pong, bananas… "Great," says the young farang, mirroring Vikorn's smile.
"Fuckee, fuckee," says Vikorn with a dumb grin.
The street is crammed, not only with horny white men but with greedy white women too, for some of the best designer rip-offs in Asia are on sale at the stalls that fill the center of the street. Tear aside the veil of conventional morality-see with a meditator's eyes-and the looks on the faces of the women are not so different from the men's:
"Only two hundred baht for Tommy Bahama jeans-that's just over three quid." Eyes bulging: "You can't get a gin and tonic for that in Stoke Newington."
"See this fake Rolex? Look, the second hand goes around all smooth without jerking, just like the real thing. It's only ten pounds."
Examining it with wonder: "We could buy a few and sell them-even at a hundred quid it's cheap."
"Would we tell everybody they're fakes?"
Thinking about it: "Have to, really, they're all going to know we've been over here."
"But they don't know what they cost in Pat Pong, do they? I mean, we could be buying at ninety and only making a ten percent markup?"
Nodding thoughtfully: "For all they know."
The Princess Club is in a side soi that is jam-packed with people. We have to squeeze past big Caucasian bodies, then into the bar, which is also packed. The mamasan recognizes Vikorn instantly, and a quite different expression appears on her face, in contrast to the tough/dumb look she wears for the customers. The Colonel is not merely immensely rich and the owner of the club, he is also her liege lord, the man who provides her, her aging mother, and her teenage son with food, lodging, and dignity. The relationship is complex and goes beyond money. (Even after her retirement he will keep her in food and pride-the bondage works both ways.) She wais him and makes a little curtsy; he nods at her and smiles; face has been exchanged across the sea of pink drunken mugs, most of whom are watching the girls on stage.
Whether the girls are allowed to dance topless (or naked) in a particular club depends entirely on the whim of whichever police colonel is running the street. This is not Vikorn's street, but no one is going to interfere with his bar, so here the girls are all topless. They don't bother to put their bras on when they come down to the floor to mix with customers, and yet they always seem in control. Strange how these wild-looking young farang men, who with their tattoos and body piercings and alcohol abuse might be barbarians on a break from sacking ancient Rome, don't dare to grope any of those oh-so-tempting young mammary glands as they wobble and swing past their eyes-not without a franchise from the owners, anyway, which always costs a couple of drinks.
The mamasan points upstairs, and we manage to squeeze past the wild hordes to the far end of the bar, then up two flights to a reception room, where they have prepared Vikorn's supper. We sit cross-legged on the floor, as we were both brought up to do, at a low benchlike table that is already laden with yam met ma-muang himaphaan (yam with cashews), naam phrik num (a northern dish consisting of a chile and eggplant dip), miang kham (ginger, shallot, peanuts, coconut flakes, lime, and dried shrimp), Mekong whiskey with chut (ice, halved limes, and mixers), and some phat phet (spicy stir-fry).
No sooner are we seated than two of the dancing girls appear, wearing T-shirts and bras now, to ask what we want to drink in addition to the Mekong. Vikorn orders a couple of beers, to be followed by a cold white wine from New Zealand. (This is all my fault. I started him on wine a few years ago, and now he cannot eat his kaeng khiaw-waan without it.) I ask between mouthfuls if he has any idea how exactly Mitch Turner died.
He looks at me as if I'm a particularly slow-witted fellow who needs help. "What does it matter how he died? We're dealing with theater, not reality. Farang gave up on reality when they invented democracy, then added television. What matters is what we tell the world. Handle it right, and we all live happily ever after. Handle it wrong, and…" He opens his hands, indicating just how tragically unpredictable life can be for nonmanipulators. The girls arrive with his green curry with extra chili along with the wine in an aluminum ice bucket, stir-fried mixed vegetables, tom yam, Chinese kale, a spicy duck salad, mouse-shit peppers, and some shredded kai yaang (grilled chicken).
