Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  5

  I waited by the car for the van after covering Pichai with my jacket. A police cruiser came with the van and a team began collecting the dead snakes and taking video shots of the scene. It took four men to carry the python, which kept slipping from their shoulders until they learned to handle it. I sat with Pichai and the black American in the back of the van while it raced to the morgue and stood by while the attendants stripped my friend and I tried not to look at the left side of his face. The giant Negro lay nearby on a gurney, his naked body covered in soot-colored buboes and drops of water from melted ice which shone like diamonds under the lights. He wore three pearls in one ear, no earrings at all in the other.

  I signed for the small plastic bag of Pichai’s personal effects, which included his Buddha necklace and a larger bag of clothes, and went home to the hovel I rent in a suburb by the river. Under the rules I should have gone directly to the police station and begun to make my report, fill in forms, but I was too heartsick and didn’t want to face the other cops with my grief. There had been much jealousy at the closeness of my friendship with Pichai.

  The dharma teaches us the impermanence of all phenomena, but you cannot prepare yourself for the loss of the phenomenon you love more than yourself.

  Pichai’s cell phone ran out of prepaid units when I tried to call my mother from my room. There is no telephone in any of the rooms in my project, but on each floor, there is an office belonging to the management company where a telephone is available. Under the eye of the fat female clerk, who is addicted to shrimp-flavored rice puffs, I call my mother, who lives in the steaming plains about three hundred kilometers north of Krung Thep in a place called Phetchabun. She and Pichai’s mother are former colleagues, close friends who retired to their hometown together, bought a plot of land and built two gaudy palaces on it; that is to say, the two-story houses with green-tiled roofs and covered balconies are palatial by country standards. While I wait I hear the crunch-crunch-crunch of Fat Som plowing through her puffs, and the burden of her attention is like a hundred sacks of rice on my shoulders, for she has seen my devastation.

  I feel like a coward for not telling Pichai’s mother myself, but I cannot face this chore or trust myself not to break down when I speak to her. Nong, my mother, will make a much better job of it than I.

  I listen to the ringing tone on my mother’s mobile telephone. She changes the model every two years because she always wants the smallest. Now she owns a Motorola so tiny she is able to keep it in her cleavage. I think about it ringing and vibrating between my mother’s breasts. She always answers cautiously, never knowing if it will be a former lover, perhaps a farang from Europe or America, who has woken up in the middle of the night longing for her. The loneliness of farangs can be a fatal disease which distorts their minds and tortures them until they snap. When they begin to sink they grasp at any straw, even a Bangkok whore they had for a week on a sex vacation long ago.

  My mother has been retired for more than ten years, but the calls still come from time to time. It is her own fault, because she always arranges for calls to her old mobiles to be patched forward to the new one. Maybe she is still waiting for that special call? Maybe she’s addicted to the power she wields over desperate white men?

  “Helloo?”

  I tell her and for once she has nothing to say. I listen to her breathe, her silence, her love, this woman who sold her body to bring me up.

  “I’m so sorry, Sonchai,” she says finally. “You want me to tell Pichai’s mother for you?”

  “Yes, I don’t think I could face her grief right now.”

  “Not as great as yours, my love. D’you want to come up? Stay with me a few days?”

  “No. I’m going to kill the people who did it.”

  Silence. “I know you will. But be careful, darling. This thing seems very big. You’ll come to the funeral, of course?”

  I have thought about this on the way home from the morgue. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Sonchai?”

  “Country funerals.”

  Pichai’s body will sit in its decorated coffin under a pavilion in the grounds of the local wat, with a band playing funeral dirges all afternoon. Then at sundown the music will liven up, Pichai’s mother will have succumbed to community pressure to throw a party. There will be crates of beer and whisky, dancing, a professional singer, gambling, perhaps a fight or two. Dealers will arrive on motorbikes, selling yaa baa. Worst of all will be the incinerator. In that remote place it looks like something from the early days of steam, with a long chimney, rusting, shaped just large enough to accommodate the coffin, with a tray for a wood fire underneath. The smell of Pichai’s roasting flesh will fill the air for days. My soul brother’s flesh is my flesh.

  “They’ll burn him in that thing, won’t they?”

  My mother sighs. “Yes, I expect so. Come up soon, darling. Or d’you want me to come down to you?”

  “No, no, I’ll come. After it’s all over.”

  Fat Som is slack-jawed for once when I replace the receiver, a bunch of pink puffs half eaten between her teeth. She wants to say she is sorry, but doesn’t know me well enough. The nature of her karma is that she cannot communicate feelings, because of some defilement from a previous lifetime, and is therefore condemned to be fat and resentful. She tries, though, with some futile wrinkling of the brow, which I do not acknowledge as I leave the room. I hear the telephone ringing in the office as I stride down the corridor, and think that Fat Som will have to finish her mouthful of puffs before she answers it. I am on the point of inserting my key into the padlock on my door, which so much resembles the door of a cell, when I hear her calling and, turning, see that she has emerged from her office and is rolling toward me breathlessly, her flesh rippling under her cotton dress. “It’s for you.”

  Astonished, for nobody calls me here, I think that it is some mistake and that I will not take the call, but Fat Som is insistent. When I reenter the office she is weeping like a child. I wonder if perhaps my tragedy has snapped her karma, if she will be liberated now, if Pichai died an arhat after all and has the power to heal from where he waits on the shores of nirvana? I smile at her (for which she is almost unbearably grateful) as I pick up the receiver.

  A man, an American, speaks English into my ear. “May I speak with Detective Sonchai Jipeecheap please?”

  It takes me a moment to realize he has attempted to pronounce my family name. “Speaking.”

  My English is almost free from a Thai accent, although it contains shades of many others, from Florida to Paris, reflecting a childhood spent in the wake of my mother’s career. I am told that when stressed I speak English with Germanic precision and a Bavarian accent. I will tell you about Fritz soon enough.

  “Detective, I’m very sorry to be calling you at home at this time. My name’s Nape, I’m the deputy FBI legal attaché at the American embassy in Wireless Road. We’ve just been contacted by a Colonel Vikorn who has informed us of the death of William Bradley, a Marine sergeant who was attached to the embassy here. We understand you are investigating?”

  “That is correct.” Shock has distorted my perspective. I wonder if this conversation is taking place on some other planet, or in hell, or even in one of the heavens? I have no sense of gripping this unreality.

  “I understand your partner and close friend Detective Pichai Apiradee also died, and I want to extend my sincerest condolences.”

  “Yes.”

  “You probably know that under a protocol we have with the government of Thailand we have the privilege of access to information you may come by in your investigation of the death of American service personnel in such circumstances, and by the same token we would be willing to share FBI forensic resources with you. When would be convenient for you to come to the embassy to discuss information-sharing—or would you prefer we come to you?”

  I want to laugh cynically at the thought of entertaining the FBI in my tiny hovel without chairs.

&n
bsp; “I’ll come, but you must give me a little time for the traffic.”

  “I understand, Detective. I’d offer to send a car, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t solve the problem.”

  “No. I’ll come. I’ll come soon.”

  Without returning to my room I descend the concrete staircase to the ground floor. Outside, a makeshift shop leans against the wall of the building, with a long green awning which extends almost to the ground. Under the awning louts with many tattoos and almost as many earrings lounge on camp beds, smoking and drinking beer, their numbered jackets slung on the ground beside them. These are the licensed motorbike taxis, Krung Thep’s most dangerous form of public transport, and its fastest.

  “American embassy, Wireless Road,” I snap at one of the louts, and kick the side of his camp bed. “Now.”

  The louts are local suppliers of yaa baa. They are intermittent users, too. From time to time I have toyed with the idea of busting them, but if I bust them someone else will take over the trade and perhaps expand it beyond the scope of these boys. Hit dirt with a stick and you will certainly spread it. Anyway, they buy a lot of their yaa baa from police confiscations, so there would be professional consequences for me. Colleagues would complain I’d taken the bread out of their children’s mouths.

  The motorcyclist whose bed I kicked jumps to attention and then runs to his bike, a 200 cc Suzuki, which must have been very sexy when new, with sculpted lines which run from the teardrop fuel tank to the upturned twin exhausts. Krung Thep has a way of punishing elegance, though, and it looks shabby now, with quite a few dents, mud on the footrests, rusting exhausts, a torn seat. The driver offers me a helmet but I refuse. Helmets for passengers are one of our many unenforceable laws; most people prefer the risk of head injury to the sensation of having one’s brains boiled.

  “You really in a hurry?” the kid asks.

  I think about it. Not really, but anything to distract my mind, which is starting to implode. “Yes, it’s an emergency.” The kid’s eyes gleam as he presses the start button.

  I enjoy the ride because I’m sure the kid is on some drug or other—if not yaa baa, then ganja—and on quite a few occasions I am certain I am about to die and join Pichai sooner than expected. It is with disappointment and some surprise that I see the white walls of the American embassy as we turn off Phloen Chit, and find myself still in the prison of the body.

  I pay the boy, then make his eyes widen when I say: “Get me some yaa baa. Come to my room tonight.” Excited all over again, he makes wheel squeals as he rides away. Now I am face to face with a bronze eagle in a plaster medallion, a stainless steel turnstile and some heavily armed Thai cops lounging against the walls. I show my ID and tell them I have an interview with the FBI. This is relayed to the American behind the bulletproof glass at the turnstile, who takes my name and makes a call.

  In meditation there is a point where the world literally collapses, providing a glimpse of the reality which lies behind. I am experiencing the collapse but not the salvation. The city falls and rebuilds itself over and over while I wait in the heat. I wonder if this is a message from Pichai? Meditation masters prepare us for the shock when we finally experience the fragility of the great out-there. It is supposed to be a very good sign, although for the untrained it presages certain madness.

  Fritz was a bastard whom my mother and I both loved for a moment. The others were kinder but somehow we never managed to love them.

  6

  While I wait I remember the embassy was rebuilt in 1998, soon after the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The ambassador appeared on TV to explain, in not-bad Thai, that although America saw no threat from the Thai people, she feared those long porous borders with Cambodia and Myanmar where explosives and heavy armaments could be bought by just about anyone. Now the walls are massive reinforced concrete, capable of withstanding an assault by a ten-wheel truck, and if the truck did succeed in breaching the walls, there is a moat. In the twenty-first century the American ambassador works in a medieval castle. What is the karma of America?

  Suddenly the American in the cabin, who might be a marine in plain clothes, decides to let me through the turnstile. One has to adjust to the jerkiness of farangs; this one has replaced his first jerk of suspicion with a jerk of hospitality. Through his microphone he says: “The Bureau is expecting you. D’you want to wait in here, in the air-conditioning?”

  Something bleeps as I cross the threshold and I see a colorful image of myself and every metal object in my pockets displayed on a monitor on the desk. In the cabin I shiver at the blast of cold air. The young man at the desk, his hair so close-cropped he is almost bald, stares at the monitor for a moment, then asks me for my ID, the number of which he taps into his computer. I see my name appear on the screen. The marine grunts. “You’ve never been here before.” This is not a question, it is what the computer says. “Next time we won’t have to go through all this rigmarole.” As he speaks he nods in the direction of the main buildings as if it were the rigmarole who is now walking mannishly toward us, a gigantic ID tag swinging from between her small breasts. Even from this distance I see that the rigmarole’s name is Katherine White, deputy chief of security. About thirty, brunette, intense, athletic, frowning. I feel very Thai, despite my straw-colored hair and sharp nose.

  “You have Detective, lemme see, Jiplecreap, for the FBI legal attaché?” Her voice is squeaky over the voice transmission system.

  “Yep.”

  “I wasn’t expecting him to be in there. Do I come in or do you bring him out? I forget which.”

  “I guess I can bring him out. Probably he could make it out all on his own.”

  The woman nods gravely. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  The marine raises his eyebrows, I nod, the young man opens the door of the cabin and I step out onto the moon.

  “You are Detective Jiteecheap of the Royal Thai Police? Can I see your ID please? Sorry about this, but I have to sign for you. Thanks.” She establishes that I have not been substituted by someone else in the past five minutes and leads me across the forecourt toward the main buildings.

  Katherine White is blithely unaware that she once accompanied me across a courtyard of startlingly similar dimensions, thousands of years ago. My Egyptian incarnation is the furthest I’ve been able to trace my lineage. A priest who abuses his power pays the heaviest karmic price. I spent three thousand years locked in stone before emerging as the most wretched slave in Byzantium. Pichai also recalled those far-off days when travel to the other side and back was commonplace. We occasionally relived those power-filled moments together: the escape from the body, the black night under our wings, the wonder of Orion.

  7

  Now I am standing in the office of the FBI legal attaché and his assistant, Jack Nape, who has just given me one of those gigantic smiles which are hard to believe in, and make one feel guilty for not believing in. Surely this is exactly how a man should be: positive, generous, optimistic, with a smile to swallow the world? He is average height for an American. I am tall for a Thai, so we are pretty much eye to eye.

  “That was pretty fast. I wasn’t expecting you for another hour.”

  “Bangkok helicopter.” I look around the office. There are two desks of identical size facing each other next to a window, a computer monitor on each, a set of filing cabinets with an American football on one, bookshelves against one wall with a set of dark legal tomes, a sofa, a coffee table, some spare chairs against a wall, an American flag standing in a corner. I’ve seen this office before, surely, hundreds of times, in movies?

  “Jack?” A voice calls out from behind a door. “That detective here?”

  “Yep, just arrived.”

  A sound of water in a washbasin, and the door opens. This man is older, perhaps in his mid-forties, with graying hair, broad shoulders, a heavy walk as he crosses the floor with his hand out. “Congratulations, I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone cross town so quickly. Tod Rosen.
How d’you do it?”

  “He got the Bangkok helicopter,” Jack Nape says.

  “Bangkok helicopter, huh?” Rosen looks uncertainly at Nape, who shrugs.

  A moment of silence. Too late I realize I am supposed to explain. Unforgivably, I let the beat pass without doing so. Jack Nape comes to the rescue. “Could it have been a motorbike?”

  “Yes,” I say brightly.

  Still Nape has to rescue the moment. He turns to Rosen. “Sounds crude but those motorbike taxis really do beat the traffic.”

  “Oh, right.” Now I understand that Rosen is new to Krung Thep. “Whatever works, I guess. Great city, lousy traffic.”

  Again I miss the beat. Normally I do better than this. The problem is that suddenly I cannot look at a man without seeing a cobra gnawing at his left eye. I’m sure if I looked in a mirror I would see the same thing. This vision has wrecked my social skills.

  “Well, ah, let’s sit down, shall we? Can I get you a coffee?” I say no. I don’t ever want to eat or drink again. “I want you to know how much we appreciate your coming to see us at a time like this,” Rosen adds.

  “That’s right,” Nape echoes. “If my partner had just been killed, I don’t know how I’d feel.”

  “You’d feel pretty damn shitty.”

  “I guess so.” Nape shakes his head in wonder. I swivel my head from one to the other.