The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get them. In the meantime you might try his apartment.”

  “I’m onto it—but the place was very clean. Any fingerprints or hair samples are likely to be from cleaners or the forensic people—it was never the crime scene, so we weren’t too careful.”

  “What about his car?”

  “Yes, I’ll try it.”

  I get the keys to Frank Charles’s Lexus from Sukum and take a cab over to the building on Soi 8. Charles’s penthouse owns three parking spaces underneath the building, and it takes about a minute to find the metallic-gray sedan parked in one of them. Best bet for prints, always, is to dust the gear stick and steering wheel. I dust both and lift the prints. Even in the rough I think I can see one set of prints repeated over and over again. I also pick up a selection of fiber rubbings from the front seat, pop them into a bag, rush them over to forensics—and even though it’s only three in the afternoon, I’m so exhausted from having been up all night I decide a massage is called for. I go to the massage shop at the corner of Soi 39 and Sukhumvit, mostly because of the sense of religious silence that prevails there after lunch when most of the customers have gone back to work and most of the girls are fast asleep.

  So here I am, prone and submissive under a muscular girl who is all of five feet tall and in the process of delivering the most delicious torture to my mind-ravaged body, when—of course—my cell phone rings. I fish it out of my pants, which are hanging by my side, to check the identity of the caller. I only deal with emergencies during massage, but when I see it is the FBI I signal to the girl to hold off with the torment for a moment while I take the call.

  “Got it,” the FBI says, “it was an amazing piece of luck. I just happened to be making some casual checks on the Net, using Frank Charles as a keyword, and guess what? He was in some kind of paternity dispute with a Thai woman here in the U.S. a few years ago. It seems she was trying to tap him for dough on the assumption he wouldn’t fight the claim for child support, but he did, and the DNA test came out in his favor—it wasn’t his kid. So I got hold of the file and now we not only have prints, a mouth swab, and some hair follicles, we have the DNA chart. We already have his DNA profile, in other words. I’m sending it via e-mail, you’ll have it in roughly ten seconds.” She hangs up.

  If I was a cooler kind of cop I’d let the girl finish with the massage, but I’m not. I apologize and give her an extra big tip, and now I’m on a bike on my way back to the station. Sure enough, when I arrive I see the FBI has already sent me the file. Now I don’t need the prints and fiber from the Lexus. I print out the DNA chart and hold it to my heart for a moment, while expressing profound thanks to the Buddha that I have not totally lost my touch or my luck or my mind. In fact, I’m wondering why I was so slow to catch on. Even Frank Charles’s obesity makes a sinister kind of sense: who was ever going to doubt the victim was him, the morbidly obese giant with the long hair, fat face, and gray beard? But all those things—the beard, the obesity, the long hair—have the capacity to diminish individual traits. Somehow, Charles found a willing substitute—such things have been known—who was prepared to die a few years earlier than expected (with that kind of weight no one lives long; maybe the proxy was terminally ill?), in return, perhaps, for a generous payment to his dependants? With the corpse mutilated in exactly the way portrayed in the movie, no one was going to doubt the identity of the victim—it was a brilliant device, depending more on illusion than anything else: the one thing no sane person was going to doubt was that the victim was the Frank Charles. Amazing! It was only the unexpected revelation that the death scene in the movie was faked that put me on the right track. Now everything is clear and obvious and I’m kicking myself for not working it out before. For some reason, Frank Charles wanted to disappear—why? I don’t know. When I call Doctor Supatra, she tells me she’ll have a DNA test done using the victim’s blood and get back to me. It will take a couple of days.

  43

  Isn’t it awful when the glorious rediscovery of your innate genius and street smarts turns out to be a delusion? That’s the trouble with relentless optimism: it leads to suicide. Right now I’m thinking maybe I really have lost it totally; okay, it was a reasonable hypothesis that if the movie was faked, it was to provide Frank Charles with a way of finally liberating himself from an identity which had become a burden. In Thailand it is not unusual for someone with the means to buy a new persona in some other province, or, as often as not, across the border in Cambodia, where the bribes are lower and enforcement rarer—but in the case of a rich farang, his refuge could have been just about anywhere in Southeast Asia. I had visions of turning up uninvited and unexpected on some five-star beach, maybe in the Philippines, or Malaysia, or Vietnam, or—my first bet—Sihanoukville, Cambodia, with the bad news that I had come to arrest the fat bearded guy who had only recently bought a beach property in an obscure spot where he had planned on living out the rest of his days in peace and anonymity. Wrong.

  Supatra just called with the astonishing news that the deceased really is—was—Frank Charles: his DNA matches perfectly the DNA chart the FBI provided from the paternity action in California. Now I’m scratching my head. Have you ever heard of such a thing yourself, farang? A guy takes the trouble to record his suicide message about a year before the event, goes through with it all on film to the last gory detail—except he fakes it. Then, next thing you know, he turns up dead in the same sordid flophouse where he filmed his fake suicide, and not only that, he dies in exactly the way he pretended to die in the movie? Amazing. Maybe you’ve worked it out already, farang, after all, you have the full genetic complement necessary for this conundrum. Myself, I’m only half Western, and I just don’t get it.

  For the moment, I’m working on the psychologically sound hypothesis that he chickened out the first time, then brooded and dared and cursed himself to the sticking point where he was actually able to go through with it; that’s why we have a fake suicide followed by a real one. This is by no means unusual in the self-annihilation community: so often someone is talked down off a high ledge where they were coyly waiting for attention, only to jump under a train a month later. You can’t stop human will. I’m uneasy, though; this case has levels all the way down to caverns measureless to man, and my doubting mind is already finding holes in my new hypothesis. If he finally decided to do himself in, why imitate the movie? Why go to that ridiculous amount of trouble when a simple overdose would have done it? There was a case in Soi 11 of a Belgian john who paid the owner of the Twenty-Four Bar for nonstop servicing by not less than two girls at a time for a twenty-four-hour period while he worked his way through a box of Viagra and a bottle of vodka. In his sixties, he died of a heart attack a few days later—it’s the kind of ending I would have expected of Frank Charles. Yep, uneasy fairly describes my state of mind. I seek relief in doodling on a Post-it sticker, then, feeling somewhat primitive, I decide instead to avail myself of the Internet for its infinite distractions. How about keying in a few names and playing chase-the-clues-across-the-planet? One name holds a particular sonority.

  In less than five minutes I have the webpage of one Robert Witherspoon, a Hawaii-based gemologist. It’s a professional sort of page, uncluttered, elegant, with no extraneous advertising and a CONTACT ME panel small enough to ignore. There is no way to order his products online. You get the feeling this is not a beginner who recently graduated from gem school after giving up day trading in pork bellies. Either Witherspoon does not need an army of Internet customers, or he figures discretion is the best marketing device for the global 2 percent he wants to attract. There are no pictures of his stones set in flattering filigree silver or gold. In fact, there is only one picture on the whole page: a beautiful gem cut perfectly with facets to catch and break light from all directions. It dominates the monitor like a beacon and is only half explained by the caption, which reads, A perfect Padparadscha Sapphire will be orangey pink in color.

  Properly understood,
it’s a tap-your-desk-and-wait-for-the-brain-to-catch-up moment, but I seem to be doing a lot of that these days. I’m actually sort of freaked out by the sight of the big orangey-pink sapphire in the middle of my screen. I mean, my intuition is screaming that this is a case solver of a break, but I just don’t know why or how. Anyway, it’s lunchtime and Lek feels rejected if I don’t take him across the road at least three times a week.

  Now I’m at the braised-pig-knuckle food stall opposite the station with Lek, who still watches me anxiously for signs of psychosis. Normally he doesn’t eat pork except to keep me company, but we both know that if you reach the stall early enough you can have the pick of the choicest pieces of meat braised to an exquisite tenderness so that it melts in your mouth, and even a 90-percent veggie like Lek cannot resist. We order a couple of iced lemon teas to finish, then lean back in our plastic seats.

  “Padparadscha,” I say with an insane smile.

  “That’s the fourth time you’ve said that,” Lek complains. “At least tell me what it means.”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “That’s why I have to keep saying it.”

  Lek sighs and sucks neurotically on his straw in an expression of distress which empties the glass. When we’re finished I realize the need for some more Internet surfing; I return to my desk, and key in the name Johnny Ng.

  Well, you can’t expect your luck to hold all day long. In Hong Kong, it seems, there are about a million people with the surname Ng, and about half of those own webpages. That’s what happens in societies with too much money and too few brothels: citizens are forced to play with themselves in cyberspace. Ng: I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Where’s the vowel?

  I pause to open my mind to the cosmos. For some reason this cannot be done in the police station, so I take a stroll. It’s around three in the afternoon, which is to say between meals and therefore snack time. Most of the cooked-food stalls have closed for an afternoon break, but a nifty new gang of entrepreneurs on wheels have shown up with snacks on a stick. Sausages, fishballs, eggs, shrimp, chicken, whole fish, ice cream, frozen coconut, dim sum, satay, dough balls, watermelon, and dried squid can all be eaten off a bamboo spike: watch. Now I’m tucking into a well-stuffed Isaan sausage and feeling a little better, not so much because I was hungry but because I’m claiming back my city soul. Nobody who wasn’t reared in Krung Thep can saunter down the street with a gun stuck down the small of his back, gnawing at sausage, nodding to acquaintances, grabbing an iced lemon tea from the iced lemon tea lady on the corner, and generally walking the walk with the kind of panache I’m exhibiting at this moment; it might not be much, but it’s making me feel like the man. It’s good for inspiration, too.

  Now I’m back at my desk frantically surfing the Net again, with an idea so whacky I’m embarrassed to be following it up, and I’m not going to tell you about it, farang, unless it yields results.

  Well, it has. How about this: I used a search engine to find people named Ng in the Hong Kong gem trade, and guess what? One Johnny Ng is quite well known and successful in that field. I even have his office telephone number and his Internet address. My instinct, though, is not to give him any room to maneuver: I’m thinking of getting on a plane. But before I do that, I need help. Detective Sukum is out of the station on some minor case at the moment, so I decide to hit him with a question designed to jangle his nerves. I call him on his cell phone, and as soon as he has said hello I say, “What is it about gemologists that Doctor Moi is attracted to?”

  “Huh?”

  “Witherspoon and Johnny Ng—both jewelers and gem traders. I haven’t checked on the two dead husbands—named Thompson and Legrand, I believe—maybe you can save me the trouble? After all, you were the one who sent me that article about padparadscha. You also sent me the Suzuki case.” The pause is so long I think we’ve been cut off—then he lets me have a long sigh. “Get off the phone.”

  44

  Sukum will not speak to me at the station. He will not even communicate via Lek. I think I’ve lost his support completely, and maybe I’ll even have to report him to Vikorn for holding out on me with information vital to my investigation, when I get a text message from an unidentifiable source:

  Look under the near left leg of your desk. Be discreet.

  Pretending I’ve dropped something, I do as instructed. Printed on a small piece of paper:

  12:20 p.m., Taksin pier.

  The important thing about Taksin pier is that it connects the Skytrain to the riverboats: you can take the train to the terminus, walk down the steps to the river, and buy your ticket for any direction: upstream, downstream, or across. I noticed that Sukum was in the same compartment of the same train as me, but he would not acknowledge me, so I make no attempt to approach him at the line for the boat tickets; on the other hand, I need to be close enough to him to find out where he’s going. In the event, he helpfully points downstream before scurrying off to wait for the boat on a bench as far away from me as he can find. Now the boat’s here, about seventy feet long and ten feet wide, a pilot at the back whistling his lungs out with Morse-like directions to the captain as he pauses for a moment at the jetty. The intense whistling brings excitement and a dash of fear as everyone hurries to get off and on. Finally Sukum and I are forced together by the crowd as we board.

  We are hanging on to stainless-steel uprights at the stern of the ferry, designed to help people keep their balance during turbulence. Sukum is wearing an incredibly loud banana-and-mango tourist shirt, shorts which show his unexpectedly powerful legs (he’s built like a football player), dark glasses, and a straw hat, which he has to press down on his head when the boat speeds up. I intuit he would have preferred a more temperate climate for this meeting so he could have worn a raincoat with the collar turned up to his eye sockets.

  “You’re half Thai, so you are the victim of superstition,” Sukum explains. He is embarrassed that his security precaution has forced him to shout into the oncoming wind, right into the ear of a farang woman tourist, who glares at him. “But you are also half farang, so you don’t have it in the marrow of your bones the way full Asians do.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You might have guessed. I myself didn’t see the connection until your mother mentioned she had spotted Moi with the victim, Frank Charles—then I got scared.”

  “You’ve been watching me buzzing around like a fool all this while?” I yell.

  “Correct,” he yells back. “I admit to a certain ego-based pleasure in knowing more about the case than the great Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. On the other hand, I have tried to discourage you. You can’t complain that I’ve been cynically watching you race toward death.”

  “Like Moi’s two dead husbands?”

  “Yes. Like them.” He screws up his face for a moment and shakes his head. “Farang say Asians are corrupt. Maybe we are, but it’s a disease we’ve developed some immunity to—most of the time we keep it under control, because we know in our hearts that too much corruption leads to destruction. Farang have no such instinct. Once they get into grabbing dough, they show no restraint.”

  “You better give it to me in chronological order, Detective.”

  “Not a chance.”

  I frown. “What? You wear fancy dress and drag me here in the middle of the river just to give a half-minute lecture on differentials in global corruption?”

  “Right.”

  “Are you going to tell me any more?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “If it is obvious your information comes from me, we both die. If I just give you a few clues to follow up, maybe only you die.”

  Try as I might, I cannot fault his logic. “Okay. Give me one more clue to take me forward.”

  “Look in the gem trade journals.”

  “That’s it?”

  He scans the crowd around us like a security camera before saying in a superior voice, “Yes, that’s it. Let’s change the subject. That file I sent
you—the Japanese suicide your katoey got all worked up about, how’s it going?”

  I’m so irritated I think if not for the crowd, I would punch him.

  45

  Not everyone on the street in downtown Hong Kong is talking about money on a cell phone—only 99 percent. You don’t need to be an investigative journalist to realize this place is all about dough. I’ve been ashamed of my generic Thai black pants, white shirt, and black jacket since the moment I arrived. I don’t know why I didn’t think to bring my consigliere wardrobe; of course, it was because I’m not here on Vikorn business, am I? Never mind, I am armed with my Armani cologne. I’m staying at a three-star hotel on the Kowloon side, but Johnny Ng, I have discovered, is a jeweler-socialite based on the island itself. I know from the local society press that he is a leading member of the gay community here, and the only leverage I have is that he may not want it known that he was once married to a woman. He is in his midforties and, judging from the pics, still pretty. I have also discovered that everything happens around food over here. The local gem traders’ guild is throwing an over-the-top buffet supper at the Grand Hyatt tonight, which I intend to crash. In the meantime, I’m sightseeing in the world’s biggest shopping mall: central Hong Kong.

  Most people here are Chinese, of course, but there are plenty of farang, too, whom the locals call gweilo (meaning “foreign devil”: I don’t know why we didn’t think of that—just teasing). I think it’s a mistake, though, to talk about race in this city of the future; clearly the citizens here are genuinely color blind, as long as you’re a millionaire. Everyone else is second-class, or worse. Here the smiles don’t fade on shopkeepers’ faces when they see I’m Eurasian; it’s the generic jacket and black pants that turn them hostile. Just now I went to buy a necktie for tonight and the sales assistant put all my personal details into a computer before he would hand it over, so they can flood my e-mail account with special offers of three-hundred-dollar ties for the rest of my life. The clerk was so much better dressed than me he could not withhold a sneer as he handed over the long gold-embossed packet containing the tie that cost me more than a thousand Hong Kong dollars. It’s a one-off Japanese design which might someday fetch a fortune at Sotheby’s; am I being naïve to think it will compensate for the rest of my inadequate wardrobe? No, not naïve, just bloody-minded: I knew I had to have a tie, so I bought the most expensive one I could find, to confuse the hell out of them; for the rest, I’m having an allergic reaction to capitalism and cannot bring myself to buy better clothes. In fact, I don’t want to buy anything. The prices are so inflated and the sales clerks so precious, I’m feeling nostalgic for lazy Thais who don’t give a rotten durian if you spend your money or just hang around window-shopping for a week.