The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  “You brown-nosing hypocritical asshole, you just forced the Old Man to give you the Hollywood case because you cut a big drug deal wherever you went last month and now he’s eating out of your hand. You make me want to vomit. You’re not fit to be a cop. You should be in jail.”

  “Would you like to repeat that to Colonel Vikorn, Khun Sukum?” I ask softly.

  Now he’s all crestfallen, and I feel pity for him. He so very, very much wants this next promotion, so very, very much wants to show his wife and best friends he can beat me at the art of detection, that he has violated my mourning without even thinking about it. I feel sorry that he is so deeply in the grip of the third chakra, the one responsible for greed, aggression, and dominance. (I’m afraid I often think of it as the farang chakra, which is horribly unfair to you, I know; after all, look how it is destroying poor Sukum’s peace of mind, and they don’t come more Thai than him.) I sigh, pick up the phone, watch Sukum’s eyes as I speak to Manny, Vikorn’s secretary, of whom we are all terrified.

  “Khun Manny, forgive the question, but did you just call Detective Sukum to tell him he has been taken off the Hollywood case in favor of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please tell Colonel Vikorn I am not accepting the Hollywood case. He can sack me if he likes, but Detective Sukum has already put in more than three weeks’ work and is doing a very fine job.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Just tell the Old Man what I just told you.”

  “Did you just call him the Old Man in my hearing?”

  “Yes. Now get on with it,” I say, and replace the receiver.

  Not only Sukum, but the whole office is staring at me, expecting the roof to fall. Now the phone is ringing on Sukum’s desk. He looks at me in bewilderment, then races back to his post. We all watch while his face goes through a fascinating collection of emotions, from enraged to obsequious in less than two seconds. To give him his due, when he’s put the phone down he walks back over to me, gives a high wai, and says, “Thank you. I will be grateful for any assistance you can offer. I know you are very busy and a better detective than I. I humbly apologize for troubling you in your time of grief. I hereby admit I now have gatdanyu with you.”

  I wave a hand. “Please,” I tell him, “it’s not gatdanyu—you can’t owe a blood debt to a half-caste. I’m just not in the mood for promotion this year.”

  He gives me a baffled glance and shakes his head. As he’s about to leave, I give him the name of Thomas Harris and recommend The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal—in Thai translation, of course. He’s never heard of the learned author or his works. He never reads novels. I tell him he can get the idea just as well from the DVDs, which they sell in counterfeit versions at a hundred and fifty baht (you have to bargain them down from two hundred, farang) on Sukhumvit at the stalls opposite Starbucks in the Nana area.

  My generosity is too much for him; it’s too Buddhist, too un-cop. “A minute ago I hated your guts and was fighting the temptation to have you bumped off,” he whispers in a disorientated voice. “Now you might be the biggest benefactor of my life. It must be your farang blood that makes you so incomprehensible.”

  “Must be,” I agree genially. Instead of going back to his desk immediately, as he would like to, he hangs around, looking even more apologetic. “What is it, Khun Sukum? If you are stuck, I’ll try to help.”

  He fidgets a bit and does a sort of dance. “I did a little preliminary research.”

  “Yes.”

  “The victim’s name was Frank Charles. He owned a luxury condominium on Soi Eight.”

  “Yes?”

  “But if you remember, he was found in that flophouse on Soi Four/ Four.”

  I push back on my chair until it balances on the rear legs, and I’m using my feet on the desk to maintain balance. “Khun Sukum, did I not already explain, when farang get money they often stop thinking about waste. I mean, other factors come into operation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like perhaps he was embarrassed that the security at his condo would know he brought a different woman back every night, or maybe more than one. Or perhaps he thought if he behaved like that someone would tell his circle in Hollywood.”

  “They don’t have prostitutes over there?”

  “Of course, but farang suffer greatly from a disease called hypocrisy. That may be why he was here in the first place. What does his passport show? How often did he visit Thailand?”

  “Four times a year for the past ten years.”

  I open my arms in a sort of invitation to Detective Sukum to share my dubious expertise on the subject. “It may be a safe working hypothesis that he was one of those famous farang who are also sex addicts, who make regular visits to Bangkok while pretending to be working on their laptops at home. There are quite a few literary figures like that, and even more from the California entertainment industry, and lots of judgmental British journalists as well, not to mention Hong Kong lawyers. That being so, he might have bought his condo for its proximity to Soi Seven.”

  “What happens in Soi Seven?”

  “The Rose Garden.”

  “It’s a brothel?”

  How to explain the Rose Garden? “Not exactly. It’s full of freelancers. It suits young mothers who need spending money whether they’re married or not, girls with boyfriends they need to service during the evening, women with part-time jobs who can slip out of the office to turn a trick or two before going home to supper.” It occurs to me that a homily is called for: “The unpalatable truth is that promiscuity makes men happy, and quite a few women, too, especially when they get paid.”

  “It’s full of farang?”

  I notice the telltale signs of Thai shyness overcome him. “Do you want me to go with you?” I ask.

  He nods in relief and lets me have another of those smiles. Before leaving my desk I send off an e-mail to Kimberley Jones:

  All you can share about Frank Charles, Hollywood director?

  13

  Like a lot of Thais, Detective Sukum has never spent much time in the Nana area, although he has passed through it often enough and reads about it almost daily in the newspapers. Perhaps we got the idea of invisible screens from the Chinese, before they kicked us out of their country about fifteen hundred years ago. The invisible screens in this case produce a kind of psychological enclave for the benefit of farang men—men like Frank Charles, for example—who do not know how to be discreet, and so we have to be discreet for them, letting them get away with poor public behavior in a restricted area in the hope it will not corrupt our kids. Therefore I deliberately stop the cab at the Sukhumvit/Soi 4 junction and walk Sukum past the stalls that line the pavement where you can buy DVDs of the latest movies, some of them clearly marked as being for the eyes of the Oscar committee members only. (Not only DVDs, farang: designer clothes, fake Rolexes, and every martial-arts weapon of the kind strictly prohibited in your country, including nunchakus, bokken, tonfa, focus mitts, kick shields, and full-length swords in scabbards you would kill for, which you won’t be allowed to take on the plane, not even in your checked luggage—but then you know all this already; it’s all there especially for you.)

  When it comes to buying, Sukum and I both examine our consciences—no, not in the way you are thinking, farang (I wish I could get hot under the collar about designer fakes the way you do): I mean we have to decide whether to reveal that we are cops and thereby get the DVDs for free, or whether we bring good karma to the case by letting the poor Isaan hustler, in this case a young woman with a disfiguring harelip who is also deaf and dumb, have her hundred and fifty baht. It’s a no-brainer because Sukum, when not suffering from the vice of ambition, is a good Buddhist. I direct him to buy The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. When the woman with the harelip shows him the lurid covers of her porn collection, the good detective actually blushes. Well, I guess the covers are pretty raw if you’re not used to that kind of thing. Then it happens, as I suppose I knew it w
ould.

  They are a perfectly ordinary young couple, she Thai, he farang, of the kind you see often in this area. It’s their son, about six years old, who throws me. He bears only a passing resemblance to Pichai, but that’s enough. I feel my lips quivering and something happening to my lower jaw. Sukum has only just finished buying his movies and is shocked to see the transformation of my mood. May Buddha bless him, he’s able to make the connection with the kid who just passed us and touches me gently on the elbow. I say, “I’m sorry, I better sit down for a moment.”

  In Starbucks I order a cold mint mocha, medium size, and a mineral water for Sukum. He politely avoids looking at me, waiting for me to recover. How to explain that at times like this it is not merely grief that gnaws at my guts, but Tietsin’s mantra as well? I see his blade wheel vividly, as if it were a physical object, its tiny spadelike edges whirring and ripping through the illusion of identity.

  “D’you want to go home?” Sukum asks doubtfully. The idea of visiting the Rose Garden alone is pretty daunting.

  “I’ll be okay,” I say. I do not add, I wish I could light up a joint.

  The moment passes, as such moments do, leaving me purged and strangely light-headed. Relief even brings a sort of wan joy. Sukum has been watching me in wonder, and I think he has decided I’m totally psycho. I understand. He is a simple man who got upward mobility in a limited form and doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He is the only cop in District 8 who bought a car out of his own salary; he cleans it about five times a week. Nobody has seen it in anything less than mint condition, and it forms a large part of his conversation. He is also famous for his underarm deodorant and for cleaning his teeth three times a day; we know all this because he is obliged to carry out these ablutions in the men’s room at the station. According to Lek, who, when not urging me on to Buddhahood, can be a terrific gossip, Sukum also has a problem with flatulence, which he deals with through an elaborate exercise involving his stomach muscles and a great deal of inexplicable swallowing. Lek sits near him and frequently bears witness to tiny, nearly inaudible ziplike farts emanating from under Sukum’s desk. To top it all, Sukum has adopted the Chinese habit of extended hoiking first thing in the morning, to chase away the throat demons. I’m not telling you all this, farang, to be malicious, but rather to reveal the flaw in my own perception, for now Sukum shocks me with his penetration.

  “I don’t know how you feel. I can only imagine. If my son was killed, I would resign and go to a monastery.” I stare at him. “I know what you think of me, I know you laugh at me, just like all the others, especially your katoey assistant. I didn’t choose the smallness of this lifetime. Don’t you think I also would like to live a bigger life? Why do you think I want promotion so much? But it’s my karma, what can I do?” He adds, “I often wish I hadn’t married and had a child.”

  “Your home life is not entirely what you hoped for, Khun Sukum?” I ask, rather disingenuously; the detective’s fights with his wife are legendary.

  “You know very well it’s not. Let’s face it, this is the age of the booby-trapped pussy. If I tread on her toe, I’m violent. If I smack the kid, I’m a sadist. If I look at another woman, I’m a sex addict and she starts talking about HIV. If I don’t want to go to the filthy beach at Pattaya fifty times a year, I’m stifling her and the kids. At the same time I get it in the neck for not standing up for her when she gets into an argument with the neighbors, and if I don’t dominate her ruthlessly in sex she can’t reach orgasm. Then there’s always the threat of bankruptcy if she files for divorce.”

  He gives me a glance. “Go ahead, laugh.” He shakes his head and glances around the coffee shop. Out of the corner of his mouth: “If I could have held out against the sex instinct for a little longer, I might have gotten mature enough to be a monk. But I couldn’t, and what can I do now? My whole mind is cramped; there’s nothing I don’t worry about, and I have no idea where the worry comes from. I don’t like my social identity. I don’t like identity. I hate having to be somebody, it’s so burdensome.”

  My jaw has dropped, and for a moment all I can manage is a high wai to honor his wisdom. On the way, now, to the Rose Garden, with Sukum holding his illegal DVDs in a green plastic bag, I’m thinking, Hold out against the sex instinct, hmm.

  I was too rushed to describe the bar properly to you before, farang. It’s a great barnlike structure of the type used to house small modern industries and supermarkets—basically a tin roof on an iron frame with walls added and a great oblong bar in the middle of the enclosed space. What I have always admired is the way the strict Buddhist owners have preserved a sacred ficus tree, which somehow rises through the roof and is the primary source of luck for the girls, who rarely fail to bring lotus buds and wai the tree before they sit at the bar and work on being irresistible. I’m a little embarrassed that at least half of them know me and say hi and wai me as we walk in, but the good Sukum again shows his generous side. “I know you have shares in one of Colonel Vikorn’s brothels. I know your mother runs it and also has shares in it. You must know lots of working girls.”

  “Let’s be frank, Detective—my mother was on the Game. That’s the only reason I got enough education to be a cop. It’s the only reason I’m still alive.”

  At the words on the Game, Sukum snaps his face away from me, leaving me the back of his head with its crop of spiky ink-black hair. I’m thinking, I’ve really done it now and maybe he wont be able to work with me anymore, I’m just too weird, when he says, still looking away at the tree shrine, “How can you say that? How can you just come out with it like that, as if it doesn’t matter?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shock you. I was just being frank, that’s all.”

  “No, no, no.” He raises both palms to press his cheeks. Then in a whispered hiss: “My mother was too. That’s what has made me so petty. It was because I let rip with the sex instinct in a previous lifetime that my mother was a whore in this one. I feel I can never express who I really am in this lifetime. Even I think it’s weird the way I obsess about my car, when it’s just an ordinary Toyota. How can you rise above your karma so easily?”

  Buddha knows where this might have led if Marli—stage name: Madonna—did not come over to join us. She is joined in turn by Sarli, Nik, Tonni, and Pong. They all once worked at my mother’s bar, where I still occasionally work as papasan. Girls grow out of dancing on stage at an early point in their careers; most don’t like to do it after the age of about twenty-seven, at which point they graduate to less strenuous forms of self-promotion, often going freelance right here at the Rose Garden. I introduce them all to Sukum, who, I know, is trying hard not to see his mother in their faces.

  “Sonchai, so long since we’ve seen you, what are you doing here? Are you looking for girls to dance at the Old Man’s Club?”

  “Sonchai, dear papasan, will you buy me a drink?”

  I order beers all around. “I’m working,” I say. “You must have heard about the farang murder at the flophouse on Soi Four/Four?”

  They all immediately drop their eyes—whether out of respect for the memory of a valued customer or fear of bad luck is hard to say. I nod to Sukum, who fishes out a navy-blue passport with an eagle on the front. It is hardly necessary to show them the photo.

  “We were so shocked.”

  “He was such a good customer.”

  “He came about four times a year. He was a good payer. A really nice guy.”

  “What was great was the way he would usually take two or more of us, so it was fun.”

  “He was funny about being fat. He would say, You get on top, honey, I’m scared of flattening you. He wasn’t, you know, the other kind of farang.”

  “That’s right. He wasn’t neua.” Neua means “north;” we use it to describe people who suffer from a superiority complex.

  “Did he take you to a luxury apartment or a flophouse?” Sukum wants to know. He still can’t get it out of his head that someone would waste money
on a flophouse; it wasn’t as if the farang had a wife or live-in lover back at the penthouse.

  “It would depend. He would get the hots for a girl sometimes for a month, then he would take her back to his penthouse on Soi Eight. But most of the time, when he was just playing the field, he would use the flophouse. I guess he didn’t want people at the penthouse to know about his appetite.”

  “It was incredible. Of course, he used the blue pill a lot. He was one of those farang who always have to stick their dicks in someone or other. He was an addict for sure.”

  “If you did a good job he would tip double, sometimes triple.”

  “What’s a good job?” Sukum asks with sudden urgency.

  “Oh, nothing particular. Some customers can be sensitive. He was one of those. Maybe he was a bit pathetic, you know? He always wanted you to like him, maybe even love him, when you knew it was only for a couple of hours and then he’d want the next one to love him. If you did it in that way, though, like you were a real lover and not just a twenty-minute fuck, he would pay double. After a while every girl here knew that about him, so we all turned into passionate lovers when he hired us. It was kind of fun in a way.”

  “Even in a group he was like that?”

  “Oh, yes. Once on his birthday he broke his own rule and took a whole bunch of us back to his penthouse. It had a giant Jacuzzi, and we all got in with him and he was like the emperor of China with his adoring harem around him. There were ten of us altogether, the bar was almost deserted.” Titters at this.

  “Did he, ah, do it with all ten?” Sukum wants to know.

  Marli frowns in concentration. “I’m not sure. I know he screwed me that night.”