Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  30

  I’m late for the meeting and racing to the embassy on the back of a Honda 125, listening to Pisit on my Walkman. He is doing his daily run-down of the Thai-language dailies.

  The tabloid Thai Rath has resurrected the old story of the cop’s wife who chopped off her husband’s penis (the standard penalty for overuse outside the home) and attached it to a helium balloon to send it sailing over the city. The significance of the balloon was that it made it impossible for Police Sergeant Purachai Sorasuchart to retrieve his organ within the vital nine-hour minimum for our skilled surgeons to reattach it. The organ was never recovered. Thai Rath reports that new evidence from neighbors now suggests that the helium balloon was a sensationalist invention (probably by Thai Rath), for Mrs. Purachai was seen on the day of the severance behind her house prodding about tearfully in the rubbish heap, which was unfortunately much visited by rats who doubtless got there before her. Pisit insinuates that the new evidence itself was stimulated into life by Thai Rath, who wanted an excuse to replay the story which Pisit is now replaying. Now Dr. Muratai comes on the program to be jollied into giving the usual lurid details of the reattachment surgery and why Thai surgeons are the best in the world in this field: they get more practice. “So, gentlemen, if your philandering results in a visit from the knife in the night, whatever you do, retrieve the missing piece and don’t forget the ice.”

  Pisit reminds us, Thai-style, that the story had the happiest of endings: Sergeant Purachai retired from the force and ordained as a monk in a forest monastery, from which lofty viewpoint he is able to look back on his erstwhile philandering and his former organ with equal indifference. He claims to be grateful to his wife for propelling him onto the Eightfold Path.

  I pull off my headphones as we approach the embassy and realize that I’m ten minutes late for the meeting, which I interrupt when I’m finally through the security and allowed to enter Rosen and Nape’s office.

  A lean, fair man in his forties in a buff military uniform, bursting with health, is talking to a rapt audience. “I was Bill Bradley’s superior officer for most of the five years he spent here. He came in March 1996, posted at his own request. I arrived in late November of the same year. He was older than me by five years and he was the kind of sergeant you leave alone, if you’re a smart captain. He was a long-service man and he knew his job inside out. He knew what he had to do better than I could have told him, and he also knew the rule book cover to cover. Frankly, with a sergeant like that under your command your worst fear is he’ll make you look inferior, but Bradley knew how to handle that, too. He was always extremely respectful, especially when there were other servicemen around. I guess you would say he was the perfect sergeant and that perfection made him impenetrable from a personal point of view. If I have any insight at all that I would care to share, it would be that he was a man who sought perfection, of himself and his environment. My guess would be that was why he never tried to rise higher. A good sergeant like him is in total control of his world, even though it’s a small one. Join the officer class, and other forces come to bear on you, forces which are never entirely under your control no matter how good you are. A perfect sergeant, on the other hand, is that rare animal in the military: an almost free man, in command of his turf.”

  Rosen said: “Anything in his service record you would like to draw our attention to, Captain?”

  “His record was perfect. He was serving at the embassy in Yemen at the time of the attack by a local mob with AK-47s, rifles and other firearms. He risked his life bringing back another marine from the roof of the embassy while the roof was under fire. There was talk of a medal, but it never came through.”

  “What about his private life?”

  “Like I say, this was an impenetrable man. He did his duty and gave a hundred and ten percent while he was here, but off duty we hardly saw him. He came to those functions he had to attend, when a colleague retired or left Bangkok, for example, but didn’t socialize.”

  “Isn’t that unusual for a marine?”

  “In a younger man it might have been cause for concern, but Bradley was middle-aged, coming to the end of his thirty-year term. A lot of men value their privacy in those circumstances, and no one was about to cross-examine him about what he did in his spare time.”

  “He was a bachelor. Any love interest you know of?”

  “Only a very old rumor that he had a relationship with a particularly exotic local woman. I don’t think anyone here knows if that was true or not, because he never brought her here to introduce her. He always came alone to functions and celebrations.”

  “Do you know anything about a hobby or interest he might have had in jade?”

  “Jade? No, I don’t know anything about that.” A pause. “I did watch him once, in the locker room after a basketball game. He had the kind of physique you just can’t help but stare at. He’d arrived in uniform but now he put on civilian clothes. It was like watching a metamorphosis. Jewelry he could never wear on parade: earrings, rings for his fingers, a gold Buddha pendant. He put on a bright purple Hawaiian silk shirt that only looks good on black skin. That’s about the most intimate I got with the sergeant. Everybody goes through a transformation when they get out of uniform, but I’ve never seen anything that complete before. He just didn’t look like a career soldier. He even stopped walking like one, as soon as he put on that shirt.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Rosen said, and Nape echoed his words. “Oh, just one last thing, Captain. You did say that Bradley’s posting here was at his own request?”

  “That’s right. It’s in his file, which I reread when I heard about what had happened.”

  When the captain had gone, everyone looked at me, so I said: “Thank you for allowing me to attend, it has been very useful.”

  “Useless you mean,” Jones said. “Did the captain tell us one thing we didn’t know already?”

  “That Bradley was pathologically secretive,” Nape said. “And led a double life.”

  “Not so unusual in long-term soldiers,” Rosen said. “You tend to hang on to what little privacy the service permits.”

  “And that he was a control freak,” Nape added.

  “All successful men are control freaks,” Jones said.

  “D’you want to correct that to ‘all successful people’?” Nape demanded with a glare.

  Jones shrank a little under his gaze. “I guess.”

  Rosen jerked his chin at them and grimaced toward me. “So, did you speak to your Colonel, Detective?”

  “I made a written request that I be permitted to interview Sylvester Warren on his next visit to Thailand, which is today.”

  “And?”

  “I think I will not receive an answer until after he has left.”

  Rosen opened his hands generously. “Like I said, a well-connected man.”

  My stitches are healing nicely, but I allow Jones to accompany me to the gate of the embassy with one arm locked in mine, I suppose for support. The marine behind the glass is an old friend these days and he waves me through the turnstile.

  31

  The Matichon daily reports that an unusual number of ghouls have been sighted at the notorious junction of Rama VI and Traimit. This is an accident black spot and experts opine that the ghouls are the spirits of the dead who lost their lives in crashes and are now intent on causing still more fatal accidents for the sake of companionship. In death as in life, it seems, my people love to party.

  Reluctantly, I pull off my headphones. This is the moment I’ve set myself to visit Pichai’s old room.

  It is in the same project as my own, an identical room in an identical building half a mile away. At least, the architecture of the room is identical to mine. Pichai owned a TV which he left on all the time when he was at home, and a very modest stereo system on which he played Thai rock (especially Carabao) and sermons from eminent Buddhist abbots.

  A superficial observer might have expected me to be the one who took t
he decision to ordain, but this is to leave out of account the decisiveness required to step onto the spiritual escalator called the Eightfold Path. True, it was Pichai, not I, who killed that dealer, but that only goes to show he was capable of making a decision. I, on the other hand, find myself to be one of life’s ditherers. Was the Buddha really a transcendent genius who pointed out all that time ago that Nothing was even more inevitable than death and taxes? Or was he a third-century B.C. dropout who could not cope with the rigors of statecraft? His dad the King certainly thought so and refused to talk to him, post enlightenment. Is it my farang blood which fills my mind with such sacrilegious thoughts from time to time? And why should I be thinking this in Pichai’s room? I’ve actually come for his silk short-sleeved shirt and his Fila loafers, which he won’t need anymore, but find that they are gone, along with the TV and the stereo. There is no one to blame; soon after he decided to ordain he stopped locking his room, claiming that anyone desperate enough to steal from him was welcome to whatever they could carry away. Nobody stole anything for months, but after his death I guess his property was seen as fair game. I return sadly to my own room. In my absence someone has slid a piece of toilet tissue under my door. It is gray with grime and folded in a way which makes it difficult to open out. When I do so I find a short phrase in English: Must see you. Fritz. I know it is my duty to destroy the evidence, which I do by dropping it down the hole in the corner of my room.

  When Pichai was alive I never felt the smallness of my home, its squalor. Working with farangs has not helped. Even the poorest of them have windows. I wonder if a miracle of modern technology will help me in my hour of need? I take out the Motorola that Rosen gave me and decide to change the ringing tune. I work steadily through the instructions in the manual and find that I have been given a choice of fifteen different tunes which includes the American national anthem but not that of any other country. Star Wars is the only attractive option, but I hesitate to copy Rosen. Angrily I realize that Motorola has led me down a labyrinth of apparent choice leading to a dead end. I have found the perfect paradigm of Western culture, but without Pichai to share it with, who gives a shit anyway? I return the tune to the factory setting, a perfectly acceptable bleep. The exercise has not improved my sense of well-being.

  I am still in a maudlin mood and looking at Pichai’s Buddha necklace as I pass it from hand to hand like a fistful of sand when there is a knock on my door. Nobody ever visits me here, so the knock is obviously a message from Pichai, proof that he is looking after me from the other side. I cross the room in one stride and pull back the bolt.

  The FBI has reinvented herself. Jones is wearing a T-shirt with the headline SO MANY MEN SO LITTLE TIME screaming from her bosom, denims cut off just a little below her crotch, sandals with Velcro fastenings. She has dyed her hair the color of a carrot and cropped it in some spiky boyish style and is wearing a smile I’ve not seen on her before. Wet-look lipstick. I do not conceal my astonishment.

  “Hi. Ah, am I disturbing you? This isn’t a good moment, right?”

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “I looked it up on the computer. Look, this obviously isn’t—”

  “I meant, how did you find the project?”

  “Oh, right. Well, I’ve hired a car with driver. It’s incredibly inexpensive here. The Bureau’s paying, anyway. It’s part of my job to look after you, but I’ll go if this is a bad moment.”

  She is looking over my shoulder. I step aside. “Come in.”

  She takes the step over the threshold. “This is . . .”

  “This is where I live.”

  It is not difficult for me to see with her eyes. My cave is a windowless box ten feet by eight feet with a flimsy shacklike structure at one end to conceal the hole in the ground. Ventilation comes from a black hole in the rear wall which gives onto a shaft which services all the other apartments. On a windy day I know what every one of my neighbors is having for lunch. There is a picture of the King on one wall, and a narrow set of bookshelves where any normal person would have placed a television. The books are all in Thai script, so I explain to Jones, who tries to examine them: “Buddhism. I’m a Buddhist bookworm.”

  The only furniture is a futon on the floor. Jones is clearly dumbfounded. To her credit she makes no attempt at concealment. “I . . . I don’t know what to say, Sonchai. I’ve never seen . . . I mean . . .”

  “You’ve never seen such a hovel?” I feel hard toward her. I would like to rub her nose in this reality, but my depression has miraculously disappeared.

  She looks me in the eye. “No, I’ve never seen such a hovel. I’m sorry.”

  “Welcome to the Third World.”

  Sex is an odd thing, isn’t it? A power that can transform your mood like a drug. She stands there, glowing with health and some kind of anticipation, and the images of immediate coupling are surely flooding her mind as well as mine. We both cough at the same time. She smiles with those vivid wet-look lips.

  “I figured you might need some cheering up, so I bought two tickets for the kickboxing at Lumpini Stadium tonight. It’s Saturday. I hear there’s a big fight. Maybe you want to take me? I see it as part of my orientation. If you don’t want to, though, if you’d rather stay here and get suicidal . . .”

  The car is a white Mercedes. In the back seat Jones says: “I tried watching Thai TV last night. I think I got a soap, but not a soap like I’ve ever seen before. People kept dying and being reborn and carrying on the conversation they were having just before they died, and there were ghosts and a bunch of wizards who could defy gravity and lived in some enchanted land about five miles above the earth. Would you say that represents the Thai mind?”

  “Five miles high is about right. But you left out the skeleton.”

  “That’s right, there was a nifty human skeleton following the lead couple all over the place. What was he doing?”

  “You have to bear in mind we are a holistic people. We cannot take little bits of life, like lovers walking off into the sunset, and pretend that’s the final word.”

  On the way to Lumpini I feel the need for a cultural lecture: “You shouldn’t call it kickboxing. Kickboxing is a synthetic sport that had to be invented after those Bruce Lee movies. Muay Thai is something else.”

  “Oh, it is? What are the rules?”

  “Actually, there are none.”

  A grunt from Jones. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “At least there weren’t, until we had to invent some to make it acceptable to international television. Now the boxers wear those ridiculous gloves. In the old days a boxer would dip pieces of gauze in a pot of glue, then wrap them around his fists and drizzle ground glass over them.”

  “Nice.”

  “We’re talking about national defense. Until relatively recently our wars with Burma—we’re always going to war with Burma—consisted mostly of hand-to-hand combat. Primitive in the extreme, no? On the other hand, there were no civilian casualties, no deaths from friendly fire, nobody lost their home. In fact, it was rare for more than a thousand or so men on either side to die in a full-scale war.”

  “I get the point. The world has come a long way since then, right?” She leans back, sinking down into the seat like a kid.

  “Muay Thai really came into its own in the seventies when martial arts black belts from Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong challenged our boys. The cream of karate, kung fu, judo and all the others came over for a grand tournament.” I pause for effect.

  “Okay, I’m hooked. What happened? I guess the other guys lost, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”

  “None of the other guys lasted a full minute in the ring with a Thai boxer. They just weren’t used to being kicked in the face. Our boys get kicked in the face from the age of six, when they first start to train. The other guys looked more like dancing masters than fighters.”

  “Let me guess the moral. Don’t mess with a Thai, right?”

  “It’s a mistake to ma
ke us mad.”

  We fall into silence for a full five minutes. My mood starts to revert.

  “Want to talk about it?” Jones asks without looking at me. “In the States we always say it’s good to talk about things that are weighing on your mind. I’ll be straight with you, Sonchai, you really freaked out Tod Rosen with your little comment when you first met him. He would feel a lot better if you and I got to know each other.”

  “I did? Did I make some social faux pas?”

  “You said you were going to snuff out whoever was responsible for the death of your partner. That didn’t matter so much when it looked like a local gangland murder. Now that the hallowed name of Sylvester Warren has come up, Tod’s nervous.”

  “Do American cells have windows?”

  “You don’t give a shit, do you? I’ve never yet met a man I couldn’t figure out. But you . . .” She shakes her head.

  “I think Rosen is nervous about many things. Why is he here? Bangkok isn’t exactly a good career move for a man like him. He screwed up, didn’t he?”

  “His third marriage failed and he developed a drinking problem. He’s a good man, very fair, and people like to work for him.”

  “And Nape?”

  “Nape? Jack Nape is one of those Western men who arrive in Bangkok one day and by the next have vowed never to leave. I guess you could call him a refugee from feminism. He married a local woman, and the minute the Bureau recalls him Stateside is the minute he resigns. He’ll probably get a job with some American law firm with an office here. He’s very bright, knows a lot about your country. They say his Thai isn’t bad.”

  I do not explain that Rosen was a doctor last time around, who suffered an appalling nervous breakdown which he is still trying to deal with. Nape was a woman, a housewife who poisoned her husband. Jones was a man, a gangster and womanizer of enormous appetite. He was the one Nape poisoned, which is why they have come across each other again this time around, with much of the previous hostility.