by John Burdett
"We were speaking, were we not, of the great Abu'l Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd?" With a smooth flourish the imam adjusted his robe. His voice was hardly more than a power-laden whisper. "Shall we continue our study?"
"God willing," murmured the others.
Mitch realized he had stumbled upon a seminar of the learned in which the words of an ancient cleric were being examined and discussed. Mitch was enthralled. Nevertheless, he decided to wait outside the house until the seminar was over. With whatever grace he could muster, he stood up, bowed, and waied, and left the room. He feared his footsteps on the wooden stairs that descended to the path that led to the well were the loudest noise in this tranquil valley.
He waited by the well. It was nearly dusk; therefore the imam would go to the mosque to pray before he would have time for Mitch. He watched while they all trooped out of his house, crossed the short path to the mosque, and disappeared inside, exactly as the muezzin's song seemed to rise from the grass up to heaven. The sun set, the moon rose: an impossibly large and shiny crescent hung haphazardly above a palm. It did not surprise him that the imam possessed the magical power to creep up silently from behind. At the sound of a cough, Mitch turned and there he was, leaning against the opposite side of the well.
The imam spoke softly in formal, accented English unconstrained by context:
"There will be peace on earth when Hollywood makes movies in which the heroes are non-Americans. According to someone called Ibn Qutaiba a certain rose bush used to be cultivated in the gardens of Hindustan, the petals of which were bright crimson and bore the text in Arab characters of the famous line from the Koran: There is no god but God, Muhammad is the prophet of God."
"I see," said Mitch in the slow drawl of a man under a spell.
"That's it? That was his Islam?" I ask Chanya as we lie naked side by side in our poor shack, listening to the sounds of the night.
"That's all I remember. He was pretty incoherent at this point."
"And the tattoo?"
The horimono was a different matter, one requiring some fairly concrete decisions. Chanya sees it as the male equivalent of a breast implant: the revolutionary modification that would surely change one's destiny. All she knows of the origin of the tattooist is that he emerged from Mitch Turner's Japanese connections. Turner, as a nonofficial cover operator in Tokyo, built up a wide network of contacts with whom he kept in touch. As frequently happens in the spy business, not a few of these contacts were associated with the underworld, which was to say the yakuza mobs. From time to time the e-mail gossip still echoes with memories of the hilarious exile of a manic tattooist who got drunk one night with a yakuza godfather and tattooed the mobster on the forehead with a picture of Mount Fuji. It was thought the tattooist was in hiding in Bangkok. He was, the legend confirms, a master of his craft, a genius within the glorious tradition of the woodblock artists of yesteryear, but hard up and hungry for work and more than a little crazy. Using techniques known to all spies, Mitch located him without difficulty.
The Japanese tattooist came to stay for a week in Mitch's spare bedroom in Songai Kolok. He and Chanya disliked each other on sight. The segment of pinkie missing from his left hand disgusted her. When he stripped to his shorts in order to work, she realized she was sharing an apartment with a monster.
He did not speak to her at all at first, which she took to be the height of rudeness and an expression of contempt for her profession. Later she realized he was pathologically shy because of his stutter. He and Mitch huddled together over a thick wad of drawings the tattooist had made for the American spy's consideration, speaking in rapid Japanese. Mitch's instructions were quite specific, apparently. The horimono was to be a single gigantic work covering the whole of his back, from shoulders to hips. Ishy's right hand worked so fast it was a blur; he was able to produce elegant sketches at lightning speed. Chanya had never seen a man infected with the passion of art before. She was not offended that the Japanese cast not a single lecherous glance at her body. Even though she had decided to hate him, she respected his fanatical concentration. She watched, mesmerized, the first time he opened a long black lacquer box roughly the dimensions of something you might carry a flute in. She wondered if this man ever treated a woman's body with the reverence he showed for his tebori, those twelve-inch-long polished bamboo tattooing needles.
After the paper sketches came the painstaking computer work. Ishy brought a digital camera and a Sony Micro Vault. His software enabled him to impose a grid on the snapshot of Mitch Turner's back, which in turn enabled him to plan each pinprick with precision. There followed the painstaking transfer of the grid to the American's back, then broad outlines of the work using a Western tattoo gun. Finally ready, Ishy mixed his ink in another machine, which juddered quaintly. The apartment was filled with the indescribable odor of sumi ink, which she decided was neither pleasant nor unpleasant but exclusively Japanese. Stoically, Mitch endured the first deep penetration of his skin as he lay on the bed with Ishy sitting above him, using the full weight of his body behind the tebori, which the tattooist worked as if it were a long chisel.
Now a problem arose. Sober, Mitch had difficulty keeping still for hours on end. He could take the pain but not the boredom. Ishy grew irritated. He would not have his masterpiece ruined by American impatience. An obvious solution offered itself. Mitch would smoke a few pipes of opium before each session, which would keep him happily comatose for nearly eight hours. The tattooist was delighted. His concentration was such that he could easily work almost nonstop for the full eight hours. What he thought would be a two-week job could be accomplished in one, so long as Mitch remained stoned.
Chanya was not allowed into the bedroom, now an artist's studio, while Ishy worked. It was her duty to keep one bottle of sake warm at all times, that being the only sustenance the artist would tolerate while on duty. Finally she was amused at the way the tattooist emerged from the bedroom every couple of hours, went to the sake bottle, and returned to the bedroom without so much as acknowledging her existence. She had begun to understand that this was not bad manners so much as the behavior of a wild thing, a denizen of the electronic jungle that had never been socialized. To test her theory one day, she stood topless in the kitchen while the artist emerged from the bedroom, gulped some sake, and returned to his work, pausing only to remark at the door that her nakedness would benefit from a horimono-perhaps a blue dolphin over her left breast?
"Dolphins are old," sneered Chanya when he reappeared. He grunted, but the next time he emerged from the bedroom, he brought a sketch of the most beautiful dolphin she had ever seen. The proportions were entirely consistent with her charms. Now, in between the long sessions with Mitch, Ishy worked on her bosom while she sat in a chair. She was astonished at the gentleness of his touch, embarrassed by the swelling of her nipples, enthralled by this guided missile of ruthless concentration. She had not realized how erotic male passion could be when raised above the level of sex. Or how elusive. She found herself exaggerating the pain a little. He ordered her to cup a hand underneath her left breast to keep it firm: "You're not hurting that much. Tits are not so sensitive except near the nipple. It's mostly just fatty tissue."
By the end of the week Mitch's tattoo was finished, and she and Ishy had become lovers. What can one say? The sexual preferences of prostitutes can be eccentric, I of all people should know that. She was ashamed of herself, ashamed to betray Mitch in this way, but what could she do? Mitch was a prisoner of a million rules and regulations, most of them contradictory; Ishy was a wild thing who knew no rules, not even of conversation. In terms of raw sex appeal there was no contest. And then there was the donburi, that outrageous and indelible challenge to the universe. The abused and desecrated skin that had appalled her at the beginning of the week was exercising a mesmeric appeal by the end. As a lover he was extraordinarily feline; the flashes of intense color when he paid silent homage to her body burned into her mind long after he had left her. Every night she dr
eamed of gigantic, vividly colored nagas: snake gods who possess an almost unendurable sensuality. Every day when they coupled again, she thought of the American lying in a trance in the other bedroom, exactly as if she and Ishy were protagonists in his erotic opium dreams.
For the first time the balance of passion lay in her heart. When Ishy returned to Bangkok, she ached for him. She convinced herself that he needed her, that she alone with her street wisdom and undefeatable toughness could save this lost man-child who stumbled through life under the burden of a gigantic talent. But he did not reply to her text messages or her e-mails. This was a first. It had never occurred to her that when she finally fell for a man in this way, he might not respond. She went through the hackneyed stages of volcanic yearning, fury, a quaking in her guts, a sense of loss of power, and a conviction that his lack of response was connected to the onset of her third decade and/or her unsavory profession.
Her final attempt to contact her beloved consisted of a telephonic text message of the kind he favored: Y the F don't U kal? There was no electronic response, but a few days later an envelope arrived with a single sheet of paper. In the most elegant tradition of Thai calligraphy, a single sentence:
Because I am not worthy of you.
In addition to the single sheet of paper, Ishy included the last segment of his remaining pinkie. The sly reference to a certain Dutch impressionist was entirely lost on her, but not the message. Now she was ashamed for a different reason: she found her passion quite bourgeois compared to his. This great artist would sacrifice his hands for her. All she had done was yearn and groan. Thumbing the message feverishly into her mobile, she freed her heart from all restraints and resorted to the vocabulary of Oriental extravagance: I would give both my I's to see U again.
Ishy: U don't No what U ask.
Chanya: I don't kare. I want U.
With apparent reluctance Ishy agreed to see her in Bangkok, not in his home-which remained mysteriously anonymous-but in a bar on Sukhumvit. Finding his attitude incomprehensible and therefore all the more alluring, she arrived early, drank three tequilas to steady her nerves, and had no idea what to do about the great quaking in her stomach when the bashful genius walked awkwardly into the bar, ordered sake, and sat next to her. What could possibly be the matter? His eyes were on fire with desire for her, but he refused to take her to his apartment. He tried to explain, but his stutter was worse than ever and quite incomprehensible. Only after he had consumed three bottles of sake could she begin to understand what he was saying, but by then they were both too horny for words.
"I know a short-time hotel around the corner," she confided.
"I don't have any money."
Eagerly: "Don't worry, I'll pay."
In the heavily mirrored room, which was encumbered by the obscenity of a gynecological chair to serve those perversions that require it, she laid him on the bed and covered him and his outrageous tattoos with her flawless body, made him her own in the way so many men had done to her-or tried to. Now for the first time in her life she understood men and their need to possess in a total way through the act of sex. (She finally understood Mitch.)
She could not recall for how long they made love-it seemed to go on all afternoon. From time to time she sent out for warm sake for him, cold beer for her. It seemed they were satisfying a hunger accumulated over lifetimes. When their passion finally began to ebb, they switched on the TV monitor, which automatically played a hard porn video. Finally sated, with him drunk enough to lose his stutter, he talked as they lay on their backs, staring at their bodies in the ceiling mirror. What she saw there was a woman lying naked next to an extraterrestrial. She could not say why she found comfort in this juxtaposition, except that he seemed the male expression of herself at that moment; after all, for her as for him, there was no society of human beings worth belonging to, merely a torn cobweb of hypocrisy best avoided.
Ishy explained: Only through his work could he escape for a moment from his appalling sense of inadequacy, which stemmed from that lifelong problem with people. But what happened when there was no work, as was often the case? If he did not work for more than a day, he began to suffer mental torture of the most excruciating kind, a sense of suffocation-worse, of annihilation. His very existence was thoughtlessly eclipsed by people happily chatting together, by the merest glimpse of that effortless camaraderie to which Thais-especially our women-are particularly prone. Two old ladies nattering could send him into a jealous rage. (He was capable of envy provoked by the mutual grooming of cats.) His sense of isolation was of a degree no human should have to endure. He experienced the insane need to tattoo everyone around him, that they might carry proof of his existence all the way to the grave. After more than two days without work his mind filled with violent fantasies. On the inside of his skull, just above the eyes, cartoons of extreme sadism, murder, and death played out. There was only one activity that in its intensity could replace the solace of creativity.
"What's that?" Chanya asked, fearing the answer.
"Gambling."
"Gambling?" She almost giggled. She had suspected something far worse.
But as Ishy explained it, she realized this was not a vice to be taken lightly. The reason he spoke Thai so well, at least when drunk, was that he spent most of his time and all of his money at boxing contests, cockfights, horse races, and even cockroach races in cardboard cities under bridges among the city's derelicts. To finance his vice, he borrowed from loan sharks, who were invariably of Chiu Chow origin, specifically the Swatow area south of Shanghai, which has been home to the Pacific Rim's greatest financiers and thugs for a thousand years. His life hung permanently by a thread as he struggled to pay off one bloodthirsty gangster by borrowing from another. At the present moment he owed not less than a million U.S. dollars, most of it due to some Japanese financiers who saved him from mutilation at the hands of the Chiu Chow only by securing his agreement to a particularly onerous contract.
"So what does the contract say?"
"Don't ask," he replied. "Just don't ask."
Even in the grip of her passion, she saw the point. Everyone in Thailand knew about the Chiu Chow loan sharks, and she doubted the Japanese were much more humane. If they discovered a love in his life, she would become leverage; they would do to her whatever they thought necessary to squeeze more money out of Ishy. In his mad attempt to save his mind, he had mortgaged his life.
"Not only my life," Ishy replied with an ironic twist of his lips.
Desperate, Chanya found herself arguing exactly like a man: "But we could still do this from time to time, meet somewhere safe, go to a hotel, be together for a few hours?"
Ishy shook his head. The people on his tail were ruthless and extremely good at what they did. He could not risk it. He simply could not bear to think of what they would do to her. The steps he took to cover his trail today had been elaborate to the point of baroque, but still he could not afford to feel secure. This was their last moment together. He was resolute, unshakable. He would go to the grave with the comfort that at least he'd managed to protect her.
Chanya is looking at me with the shrewd eyes of a woman who has experienced every shade of male jealousy. I lick my lips and swallow to cure the dryness in my throat. "It's okay," I croak. "I'm okay."
"What d'you think? What's going on in your heart right now?"
"Actually, I'm thinking about Mitch Turner."
44
I 'm surprised at how often I do think of him (whoever he was). There was no real malice in him, he never once used those formidable muscles in anger, and even his savage words in moments of fury with the woman he loved were mostly an expression of bewilderment: how did he fall for a girl like that anyway? But I think of him mostly because he wants me to. Last night I saw him as a Superman figure, trapped in a cube of deadly kryptonite, unable to use his strength, for he dared not touch the walls. But that, it turned out, was no more than a reflection of my own prejudice. A second later he was a humble fellow in
T-shirt and jeans, smiling gently at my folly. Your back! I exclaimed. He pulled up his shirt and turned: a rectangle in the form of a picture frame, within which foreign words were written in a code I could never decipher. He shrugged: it didn't matter to him anymore, he was merely trying to help me with the case.
I'm on the back of a motorbike again, playing Pisit's talk show through my earphones while we weave in and out of the static commuter traffic. (Cars, buses, and trucks are the only objects not subject to the law of constant movement in this Buddhist city.) Chanya was fast asleep in our love den when I left her in response to Vikorn's call: another T808. The old man finally seemed to be worried about something.
Well, Pisit is having a field day with the story of the abbot in Nonthaburi who had more than a hundred million baht in his bank account when he was gunned down last week. He quotes from The Nation's short bio of the deceased monk: Thanks to his cleverness and knowledge of magic he quickly rose in the Sangha and was appointed abbot when he was thirty-seven years old.
Pisit, to Sangha spokesman: Is it common for ambitious monks to use magic as a promotion aid?
Spokesperson: Unfortunately, meditation brings many powers that are vulnerable to abuse.
Pisit: You mean like purple rain? Or hundreds of millions of baht?
Spokesperson: Buddhism has been fighting sorcery for two thousand five hundred years. Generally, we have an excellent success rate, but a few miscreants still slip through.
Pisit: The magic in this case seems to have worked through the mundane medium of drugs and sex. The rumor has it that the abbot was murdered because he double-crossed a certain army general.
