The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  All of a sudden our ferryboat man is restless, and Sukum, too, has decided it is time to leave. When we reach the shore, Sukum hands the nervous boatman a large amount of cash, far more than the value of a river crossing, and the boatman races away into the night. Sukum doesn’t look at me. We don’t talk until we have reached the road and found a cab.

  In the backseat, Sukum looks away at the deserted streets, and murmurs, “D’you get it now?”

  “I think so,” I say. “The one they were initiating, he was who I think he was?”

  “Yes. Of course. Didn’t you get a view of any of the others?”

  “A couple.”

  “So? Can we just forget about the case now? This is the moment to stop, when you have a clear and corroborated suicide—you don’t need to pester Moi or her maid anymore. You don’t need to die; you could say she’s let you off.”

  There is something strange about the way he says suicide which is hard to pin down; but Sukum is confident that what I have seen tonight is enough to stop any Thai cop in his tracks, even me. He does not understand that all of a sudden the Fat Farang Case is my last hold on integrity. I don’t care that it’s a suicide. I want to know everything that led up to the American’s death. I want to prove I’m still a cop.

  “No,” I say.

  When I look at him I remember the detective he used to be, before Moi ruined him. I imagine him staked out on the river somewhere, night after night, brave, enthusiastic, confident that in his case, at least, the system would allow him to grow into full manhood. I remember his breakdown at the end. After she slipped him the acid he was off work for three months.

  He turns to stare at me in disbelief. “Half the Thai-Chinese movers and shakers in Bangkok were at that initiation. I risked everything to show you, including my life. Don’t expect any more help from me. I’ve done enough. I’ve done a lot more than any other cop in my position would have. I’ve done a lot more than you would do—after all, you’re Vikorn’s consigliere, aren’t you?”

  I’m shocked and saddened that the word has entered his vocabulary. It means the whole station must know what I am. I say, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Terror,” he explains. “For some stupid reason I don’t even understand myself, I seem to want to stay alive. Don’t you see, if any of those people tonight find out that two humble cops know more than we should, they’ll waste us in a heartbeat? Drop it, Detective, drop the whole thing. Whatever that fat farang was really doing in that movie, it wasn’t what he claimed—or maybe even he didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing. You can see the power of her magic from the kind of people who attended her gathering tonight. What’s the matter, is your farang blood telling you to play the hero? Not in Thailand, Detective. You know that.”

  I allow a period of silence to do justice to his vehemence before changing the subject. “I didn’t know those kinds of societies use women in their rituals.”

  “They don’t—at least, not anymore. We’re talking about a Thai version and you know how conservative we are about rituals. It seems at the beginning, long before the Shaolin Monastery stuff the movies talk about, these were initiation rites into an ancient mystery dating back to the Warring States period. Before Buddha, before even Confucius, women were used as priestesses and had a lot of power. Naturally, that’s something Moi’s family insists upon, seeing as she doesn’t have any brothers. Her family members have been the Dragon Heads, Incense Masters, and White Paper Fans for more than a hundred years. Unlike in Hong Kong, in Thailand these are not elected offices, they are inherited.”

  I let a few minutes pass. I’m finally seeing the world according to Sukum. “Look, Detective, you don’t have to help anymore. I understand. You took a big risk tonight and I appreciate it and I have no right to ask more of you. But I have to work this case. I just have to. But answer one question. That other suicide, the Japanese jeweler named Suzuki—it’s connected, isn’t it?”

  He stares at me resentfully, then opens his window and turns to howl softly at the night, like a wolf.

  40

  I need the vastness of dharma, so I’m sitting on the back of a motorbike taxi on the way to Wat Rachananda.

  At the wat I pay twenty baht for a set of the following: one candle, one lotus bud, four squares of gold foil, and a bunch of incense—and I switch off my cell phone. Lighting the incense is always a chore because it takes a while to catch fire, but Wat Rachananda has an oil lamp permanently burning for that purpose. I stand in line behind a couple of middle-aged women and a young man to light up, slip off my shoes, enter the wat, hold the incense in a high wai at forehead level, bow three times to the enigmatic gold Buddha on the dais, stick the incense into the sand pit at the back of the temple, place the lotus bud on the silver platter, walk toward the Buddha, and prostrate three times. The ritual over, I turn to the more demanding business of meditation and go sit in a semilotus against one of the pillars at the back.

  Before I met Tietsin and his blade wheel it would take me a good half hour, sometimes double that, before my mind would still itself to the point where any real meditation could happen. Now, though, it takes less than ten minutes. Even while my mind is still zinging with the events of the day I can sense an appetite just under the surface—nay, a desperate, rabid lust—for some way out of here. Just before the attack from the blade wheel, I’m thinking about the fat man, Frank Charles; and Tara; and Pichai; and a dozen small, petty things—then it’s suddenly as if I am faced with the prospect of death. Nothing is important except that elusive thing the Buddha advised us not to even try to define; the terror of death does not compete with the terror of surviving death, once you’re convinced. The reality of the transcendent, in its infinite and crushing variety, causes synapses to short, hearts to groan, brains to fry. In other words, the blade wheel is here. It can appear as a gigantic terrifying rotary engine with scythelike blades or it can camouflage itself as a microscopic insect that turns metallic when it enters your bloodstream. And it can multiply itself arithmetically, which is what it does right now. With my eyes closed I experience the whole wat as filled with Tietsin’s blade wheels, all inexorably flying toward me. Like a madman I am muttering, Yes, yes, rip away, whatever the price get me out of this quicksand only an idiot would describe as life. And: Pichai, where are you? The experience is almost epileptic, the way my nerve-tormented body writhes where I sit in a kind of orgasm, until the grasping which has dominated this continuum for a thousand years melts under the power of the Buddha and I experience a few seconds of peace.

  Purged, emotionally drained, but high as a kite, I’m on the back of a bike again. At a traffic light I remember to switch on my cell phone. Instantly there is a succession of bleeps, which chide me for my radio silence. The text message reads,

  Skype me.

  Using skills honed over the years, I manage to text back, using one hand:

  Ten minutes.

  “It’s a fake,” the FBI says. I have her on my monitor at home, although the picture is kind of blurred and jerky and the colors don’t really do her justice. Most of the time she’s a feisty redhead these days, although all that exercise they put people through over there has drawn her cheeks; she looks like a super-fit sergeant at boot camp, except that her left arm is in a cast. She is hunched over her monitor and moving from side to side as if avoiding punches. I say, “What is?”

  “The end of the movie.”

  I stare at her for a moment, wondering if I’ve got the wrong conversation. “Huh?”

  “I’m talking about the film you sent me. The movie allegedly recording the suicide of one Frank Charles, famous Hollywood director. The ending is faked.”

  I have to let quite a few beats pass while my brain unscrambles. “Faked? You have ways of telling that from a digital copy? Your nerds have confirmed?”

  “Actually, yes, they confirmed, but it didn’t need nerds. All it needed was a machine that would play each frame extra slow. You could even try it o
n your own DVD player. When you play it real slow, you see the saw is touching off concealed strips of skin-colored plastic tubing under the hair—the saw just has to touch it for the ketchup to burst out, so it looks like a real medical operation, but if the saw were really cutting into bone the action would take a lot longer. I spoke to someone who does special effects for the film industry. She watched the movie and said it was a dangerous and unorthodox procedure—the saw could easily have broken the skin and then there would have been a massive civil claim, and maybe even a criminal one. They would never do it that way over here. But it’s very clever—it makes for great cinema.”

  “And the other stuff—we see the whole of the inside of his skull?”

  “Apparently, that was the easy part. Just a question of trick photography and a lot of work with plastic models.”

  “But”—I’m spluttering—“we have the body—that’s how he died—the skull was completely detached, parts of the brain had been eaten—there was real blood everywhere—someone ripped his guts out—the murder wasn’t faked.”

  “I didn’t say the murder was faked, honey, only the movie.”

  We both hang there in silence for a long moment. I say, “Wow.”

  “I agree. Wow! I’m jealous—what a great case! Is it the only one you’re working on?”

  “No,” I say, swallowing guilt like something sour in my mouth. “I’m doing something special for Vikorn at the same time.”

  She’s smart enough to take the hint. There is sorrow in her tone when she says, “Ah!”

  I am realizing how compromised I am, how my freedom of action has been destroyed by the chains on my spirit. For all her faults and her restless need for love and change, the FBI still has integrity; I doubt she’s ever broken the law in her life, or even slightly bent the ethics of her profession. For all her experience, she’s less worldly than I am these days. I envy her the unobstructed speed of her brain when she says, “I don’t want to tell you how to run the case, Sonchai, but if I were you—”

  “I know,” I interrupt, anxious, I suppose, to show I still know how to investigate a murder. “The surviving husbands.”

  As soon as I’ve closed Skype I find Frank Charles’s movie and slide it into the DVD drive. I fast-forward to the ending, then play around with the controls until I’ve got extra slow-mo. I stare in disbelief. The FBI is right. At this speed it is possible to see the edge of the saw’s circular blade touch on the hair, which is covering some kind of skin-colored strip that bulges slightly in the center, and as soon as it does so the strip bursts, shedding “blood.” I manage to catch a still and magnify it: tiny shreds from the plastic strip are clearly mixed with the spray of gore. You wouldn’t normally notice them, because they look like bone fragments. I’m shaking my head. I need Einstein. I have Sukum.

  41

  It’s around midnight when I finally decide to call Sukum to get the names of Moi’s surviving ex-husbands. Then I take a cab to the station to dig out the report from the nerds who hacked into Frank Charles’s computer. Then I take a cab to his penthouse on Soi 8.

  It’s about two in the morning, and most of the action is finished for the night at Nana Plaza when I pass. There is a drunken farang who has to hold on to the wooden guardrail of one of the bars in order to stand up, and a katoey who is trying to get him to his hotel. A bunch of whores are crossing the street to the Nana Café, where it is possible to hang out until dawn, hoping a customer will show up. There is a line of taxis, too, ready to take stray jet-lagged farang to those unlicensed bars where you’re scrutinized from behind a spyhole before they let you in (you don’t have to be white, just foreign), and where you can drink and play with girls for as long as you have the dough. Soi 8, also, is very quiet but still carries the signs of a party neighborhood: girls with farang sitting on iron seats outside a closed bar; a Westerner in his late twenties singing to himself on his way home (an ancient European Cup song to the tune of “Blue Danube”: Vienna are shit, shit-shit shit-shit); a couple of cops standing by a lamppost, chatting.

  At the apartment building they are surprised to see me and not too keen to let me into Charles’s suite—can’t it wait till morning? I’m in no mood for diplomacy, though, and opt for arrogance as a means of getting their attention. Now I’m sharing the elevator with a sulky receptionist who opens the door to the penthouse and shrugs. She doesn’t have the time or the patience to hang around, so she closes the door behind me and returns to reception. All alone in the silence of his death—which, I now realize, has quietly penetrated every aspect of his home—I decide to pause, trying to commune with his spirit. Were you murdered after all? I ask the bust in the Jacuzzi. If so, why? The response is ambiguous; I sense a kind of relief, even amusement, on the part of the deceased’s ghost, while I check out the Windows address book on the PC.

  It takes less than a second to find the name, address, and telephone number of Robert Witherspoon, Moi’s American ex-husband. Interesting that Frank Charles had found the need to keep the coordinates on his computer. Still more interesting that Witherspoon is located in Hawaii. When I dig a little further into the computer’s secret chambers, I find a Skype account with Witherspoon’s name and photograph: a square-jawed, balding blond in his midforties, wearing a black T-shirt, is attached to the address book by means of a mug shot. I click on the glyph, and the monitor comes alive with the Skype home page. I double-click on Witherspoon’s mug shot. The program tells me my request to speak to him has been sent. My heartbeat seems to have doubled, and I’m clutching the edge of the desk when Witherspoon himself appears on the screen. Now I realize I don’t have a microphone or computer camera—but Charles must have owned such items to go with the Skype account. I rummage frantically in the drawers under the desk; a plug-in mike/headphone set and camera are in the bottom drawer. I plug them into the front of the PC, don the headset, and say in a rush, “Good morning—is it still morning in Hawaii? My name is Detective Jitplee cheep of the Royal Thai Police. A few days ago I think you sent a DVD to my home?”

  A long pause, during which I imagine my words and image finding their way across the globe to Hawaii. Then: “Yes, it’s still morning in Hawaii. What took you so long?” Witherspoon says.

  “I’m half Thai,” I explain.

  Witherspoon blinks into the computer cam as if he is trying to see me more clearly. “Are you?”

  “Didn’t you know that?”

  “I don’t know scat. This guy, this Hollywood director, calls me out of the blue one day and asks me to tell him all I know about my ex-wife, the world-class witch named Doctor Mimi Moi. So I told him, which wasn’t much. We got chatting. We must have Skyped each other about ten times, so we’re bonding in a way. He asked me to do him a favor. I said, What? He said, I’m gonna send you a little package with an address on it. Just keep the package until you hear that I’m dead—then send it to the address that’s written on it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much. Look, I’d love to talk more, but I’m due to go on vacation in about twenty minutes with my new girlfriend and I don’t want to screw this one up. How about you call me in about a week?”

  I say, “Huh?” Somehow, what with the excitement of the chase, the last thing I expected was a key witness on vacation. “Where are you going?”

  Witherspoon lets me have a wry grin. “New girl, buddy, I’m being spontaneous. Speak to you.” He Skypes off.

  42

  On Bangkok murder squads, inspiration and paranoia are Siamese twins joined at the hip for life; some of us theorize they are the same thing. I’ve got it now, the insight into the devious workings of an exceptionally twisted and gifted criminal mind—but whose? I’ll find out. I’m 100 percent certain I’ve finally got a handle on the Fat Farang Case, and for the first time I’m slightly irritated with myself that I’ve promised Sukum he can have all the glory. This may be a good sign: maybe I’m returning to egocentric normality, thereby rehabilitating myself as a card-carrying citizen
of the twenty-first century? Whatever, I am unashamedly pleased with myself this fair morning when I am on the phone to Virginia. The FBI listens to me in attentive silence, then says, “You’re a genius, Sonchai, there’s no other word for it—I’ve been racking my brains about your case, but I never would have thought of the solution. You’re just amazing.”

  “There’s nothing I can do until you get me some fingerprints, or, even better, DNA samples,” I say, not for the first time.