Finally we stopped at a house made of teak, where a veranda overhung the water, and here sat Mr Fink next to a table with a lamp and mosquito coil lit. He was drinking whisky. I climbed out of the boat onto the veranda. The incense of the mosquito coil mixed with the stench of putrescence that pervaded the district even more powerfully than on the eastern side of the river.
The boatman departed to wait at some discreet distance and for a while there was utter silence. The sky was mauve, and everything beneath it was black. Just then out of the night came that dearest of sounds, the wail of a steam engine. It was clear Mr Fink lived close to the narrow-gauge railway line we had seen from the air during our flying boat trip.
‘Mr Fink,’ I said, ‘I hope you will forgive this intrusion and the dramatic news I have to convey. I have information that Roger will come here tonight and use violence against you in an attempt to gain from you information about the whereabouts of Mr Curtis. If you would be kind enough to allow me, I propose to turn the tables on Roger and use violence against him in order to find out where he and Spaulding have taken my wife. I would need your cooperation for the plan to succeed.’
‘Really, Jack? Roger used to be a boxer, you know.’
‘I know, but I used to fire a King-class 4–6-0 from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads. The movement of the right arm with the shovel is the same as the punch to the ribs that breaks the heart of the prizefighter and makes him kiss the canvas like a sweetheart.’
He made an expression that suggested he was impressed, but it was difficult to know whether it was genuine or mockery.
‘Besides,’ I added, ‘I propose to shoot him, not box him. I think you are a good egg, Mr Fink—’
He laughed softly. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Jack, but I am not really a good egg.’ His voice had a strangled quality that it did not normally possess. It was the voice of one in pain. ‘In truth, I am a pretty poor sort of chap. In that matter, Spaulding was right.’
‘If you are referring to your having deserted from the army on a matter of conscience, I have to tell you that this in no way lowers you in my esteem. I once knew a chap who refused to serve, and the ordeal he consequently suffered on account of his conscience left me in no doubt about his courage.’
He let out a sour laugh. My impression that he was in pain grew stronger. ‘I agree. It is surprising how sympathetic folk are when you tell them, particularly the people you would least expect – such as soldiers who have been wounded in action. It’s humbling. But, alas, I do not deserve to be held in such high regard. In truth, I did not desert His Majesty’s Armed Forces but left Brighton under such a cloud of infamy that I dare never return. You see, old Finky used to steal purses. From pensioners.’ He paused. ‘Can you believe that?’
‘I confess your revelation surprises me.’
‘I targeted the public lavatories on the Promenade. The cubicle doors had handles, you see. The old dears would go to spend a penny and hang their handbag on the door handle. It was an easy trick to give the handle a sharp twist and make the bag fall; then pull it out through the gap under the door. I did all right for a while until one day I stole a bag belonging to the local bobby’s mother. Next time I did it, he was waiting. I was given a good kicking in the cells and had my face featured on the front page of the Argus.’
He touched his broken nose. ‘I was no boxer. It was the bobby who gave me this. The accompanying story in the newspaper hinted that the police suspected me of being responsible for a string of other crimes, extremely unsavoury ones about which feelings had been running high all summer. The lying swine. I spent six months in the Scrubs, and was warned in no uncertain terms never to show my face in Brighton again.’ He stopped talking and reached for his whisky tumbler, but then halted and withdrew the hand.
‘Mr Fink,’ I said softly, ‘I can assure you I do not judge you. But time presses, where would you suggest the best place for me to conceal myself …’
‘I’m afraid, Jack, it is a little too late.’ The last two words were gasped as if a jolt of pain had shot through him. Blood frothed at his mouth. ‘Roger has already paid me a visit.’ He looked down. My eyes followed his gaze and noticed for the first time the blood soaking the shirt covering his stomach.
I drew back, startled. ‘Mr Fink!’
‘He was looking for Curtis. I said I didn’t know where he was. He didn’t believe me. He shot me.’
‘Mr Fink! You poor man. We must get you to hospital straight away. I have a boat.’
‘No Jack, no. You need your boat. You must use it to find your wife. They will have taken her to the beach house, the one we visited in the flying boat. The boatman will take you to the night market and from there you will be able to find a taxi.’
‘Mr Fink, I cannot allow you to die. We must take you to the hospital first.’
‘I’m fine,’ he croaked in a voice that abjectly contradicted what it said.
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘you understand me well enough to know it would be unthinkable for me to walk away and leave a man bleeding to death here?’
He considered my words and eventually gave in, clearly without the energy left to fight, and said there was no reason we might not do both. We could visit the night market on the way to the hospital.
I helped Mr Fink into the boat and he gave instructions in Siamese to the boatman. The man showed no emotion on seeing a white man with a blood-soaked shirt climb into his boat.
We drifted gently downstream as Mr Fink slowly died in front of me. ‘I have some money,’ he said, ‘a little. In my house. If I don’t make it … would you be kind enough to give it to … Curtis’s girl?’
‘Am I right in understanding,’ I said, ‘that his girl, the one over whom you bickered, the girl with blue eyes, was not a European as Mr Spaulding told me, but a blind Siamese girl?’
‘Yes,’ he said, speaking more to the sky than to me. ‘The first buffalo. I misled you when I said it was Curtis’s first buffalo. In truth it was mine. That’s why I was so disturbed when you brought the postcard to show me. Do you remember I told you about all her tricks and wiles, and I said I had come to accept them and knew they were the result of expectation laid upon her? But when she intimated that there might be something wrong with her eyes, such dishonesty struck me as too much, and so I cast her away. But then Curtis met her and fell in love. It wasn’t a hard thing to do. After all, I had done the same thing. When he found out about my betrayal, how I had cast her away for feigning blindness, he said it was caddish and we argued about it. This was when he first arrived in Bangkok.’
‘And of course, she wasn’t feigning, was she?’
‘No. I found out a year later. I had reason to visit Mueang Samut. She heard about it and asked me to go and see her. I took the bus. I’ll never forget the day. It was just the same as all the previous times, the bus made its way through a sea of people and bullock carts into a dusty main street on which a few concrete shacks stood, and a cheap hotel and a tree with a bench encircling it by the river and the customs house. I saw through the bus window an old lady sitting on the bench, and I thought that it must be her mother. This old woman sat like a statue, with a stillness that set her apart from all the other people bustling there on a busy market day. She seemed to be unaware of what was going on around her. But then at the sound of the bus she made a movement, her hand reached down to clutch her bag and it was noticeable she did this without looking down. I watched it all as if in slow motion, the way time slows down in a motor-car accident. Her hand missed the bag slightly, then she corrected her grasp, again without looking down. Then I knew she had been listening for the sound of the bus, a bus she would never see.
‘The last time we’d met she had the most beautiful brown eyes, like the eyes of a horse, dark and conker-brown and sparkly, and this old woman who was no old woman turned at the sound of the bus and I saw her eyes – they were milky blue.’
We continued to drift along. If the boatman discerned any urgency to our e
rrand he betrayed no evidence of it in the manner of his rowing. Chaps like Spaulding would have instantly mischaracterised this as laziness or a deliberate ploy to exasperate the foreigner. I did not think so. I sensed it was more the wisdom innate to residents of hot countries, where to rush is never advisable and seldom achieves more than the same purpose performed at a languid pace. I recalled a poem by Kipling we once studied at the orphanage that said as much:
A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.
‘Is it very much farther to the hospital?’ I asked Mr Fink.
He continued to stare at the sky and spoke in an exalted way, as if he were becoming feverish. ‘Hospital? Yes, did you know, Jack, if you go to hospital here your girl will come and sleep on the floor at the foot of your bed because she can’t bear the thought of your being lonely? Are these people not the most wonderful, warm, cruel, honest, dishonest, corrupt, pure-hearted things that ever lived? Nowhere on earth is there such a voluptuous concentration of vice and pleasure and hedonism and loveliness and rottenness and heat and stink all jasmine-scented, perfumed with incense and madness, and loud, louder and noisier even than the foundries of Gomorrah …’ From somewhere deep within Mr Fink had found a strength to utter the words with intensity, despite the pain, as if nothing was more urgent than this.
‘Sometimes I feel like a fly who lands on the calyx of a flesh-eating plant and knows he cannot escape but realises to his surprise that he doesn’t greatly care to, for he stands ankle-deep in a gorgeous sticky substance that tastes divine. He licks the nectar off his boots, unaware that it is actually an enzyme that is slowly dissolving him. What a grand consummation! In this beautifully stinking, utterly corrupt and toxically lovely city of glory and degradation.’
Despite his pain and fading strength his voice grew in intensity. He spoke as if he beheld a vision and was struggling to describe it to me, aware that I saw nothing but the water and the sky. I knew I should counsel him to be quiet, to conserve his strength, but some instinct told me there was no point, nothing mattered more to him now than delivering his final verdict on his life. That slow-motion fall from the cliffs of Beachy Head he had mentioned during our first meeting was drawing to its end.
A pain shot through him and made him gasp; his frame quivered, but he continued with greater urgency. ‘They call it the Big Mango, you know, but really it is a poisonous and beautiful tropical flower, scented like the moon and coated in the sweet nectar that is the joy of life distilled, and we know in our hearts that it is destroying us, and love it all the more. This is the great secret of the Siamese: they have taken the instant death of the moth in the candle flame and made it last for years.’ The intensity in his voice subsided, like an oil lamp being turned down. The last words were no more than a whisper. ‘This … this is the unique, pure and undestroyable bliss of Bangkok.’
Ahead of us, a glow resolved into a small night market next to the bank. The boatman pulled up and called out to the people there. In turn they shouted to people we could not see, and before long a car that would serve as my taxi appeared. It was a dusty Japanese sedan with a broken headlight. I shook Mr Fink by the hand and clambered ashore. I gave the ferryman a coin, a fee which it transpired would be well earned tonight, because at some point on their journey to the hospital the candle flame of Bangkok finally consumed the moth of Mr Fink.
Chapter 22
It took about twenty minutes to reach our destination. We pulled up alongside a teak house, with a banister and veranda that encircled the whole bungalow. The door was open, leading onto a hall. I heard voices coming from a room on my left. The Colt 1911 is said by many to be the finest pistol ever made. Simple, reliable, effective. It shoots where you point it and, unlike many similar pistols, always goes bang when you pull the trigger. I released the safety catch and stood to the side of the door, and from outside I formed the impression that there were only Jenny and Spaulding there. I pushed the door gently, it moved an inch. I waited and listened. Then I pushed it again until a two-inch gap permitted me to peep within. I had been right. I walked in.
There was a simple table, set with chairs. Jenny sat at the table, playing patience.
‘Oh, it’s Sir Galahad,’ said Spaulding with laboured nonchalance.
‘Jack!’ Jenny leapt out of her chair and ran to me. I embraced her with one arm and swung her gently to my side in order to keep the gun trained on Spaulding. ‘Are you badly hurt?’ I asked, speaking to her but staring at Spaulding.
‘Only a bit,’ she said.
‘Plucky girl,’ said Spaulding, in a voice that suggested he had taken a few drinks this evening. ‘She stuck to your cover story the whole time.’
‘I told him the truth, Jack.’
‘I rather think you have the wrong idea about us, Mr Spaulding. It is true I am or was a detective, but only on the railways. And it is equally true that I have been searching for Mr Curtis – I had reason to suppose he could help me find my mother. But I have now abandoned that quest.’
‘Pah!’ Spaulding expressed his contempt. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, comrade. You don’t fool me for one minute. You are as Russian as they come. You know what gives you away? This phoney British gentlemen act. The “cheerios” and “By Joves”, and “I say, old man”. The imbecilic obsession with trains. I knew it the moment I first set eyes on you. There was something false about you, something shifty, I could tell from the way you avoided a chap’s gaze. I’m never wrong about these things … I have to tell you, Wenlock, or whatever your real name is, your British accent stinks. And as for that damn fool Curtis …’ He then put on the voice of a mimic. ‘Turned out fine, again, what? If I ever hear another man say that another time I will shoot either him or me.’
The phrase turned out fine again flashed inside me. I had heard another English chap say it just recently, in Hotel 90 on my night out with the chaps … Was that Curtis? Some instinct told me it had to be. ‘It really is rather comical how wrong you are,’ I said.
‘Is it? You find it comical do you, counterfeiting an Englishman in order to undermine the King’s realm?’ As he spoke his eyes darted to the right, for the tiniest fraction of a second, as if spotting something behind me. Then I felt the cold hardness of a gun barrel being pressed against the back of my head.
‘Drop the gun, Jack.’ It was Roger’s voice. ‘Or I shoot you and your wife.’
‘If it makes it any easier,’ said Spaulding, in the supercilious tone of one for whom the cup of life always tastes bitter, ‘we are not going to shoot you. You are in luck, comrade. You’re going to be spared. There’s a very important man in town, a man with a burned face. He’s arranged a spy exchange. You for one of ours. You’re going back to Russia. So put the gun away, there’s a good sport.’
‘Three seconds,’ said Roger. ‘Three, two …’
I put the gun down on the table and raised my hands. Spaulding picked up the gun.
‘Of course, if it were down to me,’ he said, ‘I would shoot you with as much compunction as I would drown a rat. But apparently it’s not good form to shoot your spies, because then your people shoot ours and very soon no one wants the job. It’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement, which is ironic when you consider how rotten your English gentleman act is.’ He stood up to leave. ‘We are going to leave you here. Someone will be sent to collect you. If you want to see Mother Russia again, I’d stay put.’
He moved towards the door. Roger removed the gun barrel from the back of my head. I sensed it was done with reluctance. Spaulding stopped and gave me a final look, the sort one would give to an insect found in one’s soup.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘it beggars belief when you come to think about it – when you look at what a catastrophe your doctrine of Mr Marx has been for the poor bloody folk of Russia – that you want to help us achieve the same disaster in our own country. Did you never stop to think of that? Eh? What about those precious bloody railways you are always going on about? They are owned by the working man
now. God knows what sort of hash they will make of the job.’
‘I’m sure they will do a very good job,’ I said.
‘You think so? And what about the men who owned the railways and from whom they were stolen?’
‘It wasn’t theft, they were compensated.’
‘Yes, with their own bloody money! The very money they paid in taxes was used to compensate them for the theft of their own property. Where did the working man get the money to buy a railway?’
I looked Mr Spaulding directly in the eye. ‘The working men paid for the railways with the blood of their fallen comrades. The blood of the men who fell on the beaches of Normandy and all the fields between there and Berlin.’
He laughed bitterly. ‘You seem to have forgotten the English gentleman act, what ho?’
They both left. A minute later we heard the sound of a car leaving.
I turned to Jenny and she collapsed in my arms. ‘Oh Jack.’ We remained there embracing for a while.
‘Roger is going to kill Curtis tonight,’ said Jenny into my chest.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It appears he has already put a bullet in the belly of Mr Fink.’
We walked outside. Our taxi had gone. Somewhere in Bangkok tonight was a man who knew the whereabouts of my mother and a man called Roger intent on killing him.
‘How will we get back?’ said Jenny. ‘There are no cars or buses.’
The whistle of a steam engine sounded from somewhere close.
I looked at Jenny and said, ‘Are you ready?’
She made a mock salute and said, ‘Yessir!’
The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness Page 23
