Behind the Night Bazaar

by Angela Savage

  ‘I was here. Rather, I got back here around eleven. Before that, I was out with friends. Sir, perhaps if you told me what this is about I could be of some assistance.’

  It galled him to have to be so polite, but he couldn’t risk anything else. Not until he knew why they were there.

  ‘We’ll ask the questions,’ Ratratarn said. ‘And we’ll do that inside if we may?’

  It was a rhetorical question. No one invited the Chiang Mai police into their home.

  Didier stepped back to allow the men to pass. The younger one, Komet, had a sweet face, the broad nose and thick lips of a native from northeast Isaan. He looked apologetic, ill at ease in his uniform. Didier guessed he hadn’t been in the force long, and wondered how long it would take for Komet’s face to lose its softness, how long before he would have the same contempt as his commanding officer.

  ‘Komet, you look around.’ Ratratarn issued the order with a tilt of the head and turned to Didier. ‘Mister Good—I believe that’s what they call you, isn’t it? You work in Chiang Mai as a foreign academic. Research on rural development; AIDS education. You do—what’s the expression?—“outreach work” in the clubs and bars.’

  Despite the humidity, a chill ran down Didier’s spine. Ratratarn spoke as if he’d had Didier under surveillance for some time. He should’ve seen this coming.

  ‘So,’ Ratratarn continued, ‘exactly where were you earlier this evening?’

  ‘I was in a bar behind the Night Bazaar called Man Date.’

  ‘Who were you there with?’

  ‘Friends. Thai friends.’

  Ratratarn eyeballed him, a gesture Didier knew was disrespectful. ‘What were the names of these friends?’

  Before Didier could answer, the younger officer came back into the room.

  ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ he said, ‘I thought you should see this.’

  Komet handed over one of Didier’s pamphlets. Ratratarn opened it, glanced at the contents, and folded it again. With his index finger, he slowly traced around the pink triangle on the cover.

  Didier felt relief flood over him. So that’s why they’d come! He opened his mouth to speak, but snapped it shut when he saw what Officer Komet held in his other hand. It was a framed photograph of himself and Nou, which he kept on the bedside table.

  Ratratarn let the pamphlet fall to the floor. Taking the photo from Komet, Didier watched him trace the same shape, a triangle, onto Nou’s forehead and cheeks.

  ‘Was this man one of the friends you were with this evening, Mister Good?’

  ‘Yes,’ Didier whispered hoarsely. The sense of dread returned.

  The lieutenant colonel placed the picture on the coffee table and nodded to Komet. ‘Check the back of the house, kitchen, garden, everywhere,’ he said.

  The junior officer bowed and walked out of the room. After a moment, Didier heard the back door bang shut.

  ‘Khun Sanga Siamprakorn, native of Chiang Mai, age twenty-four. Worked for several years in Loh Kroh.’ Ratratarn spoke as if reading from invisible notes. He paused and cocked his head. ‘You don’t think he was a bit young for you?’

  There was a razor-thin smile on his face as his hand moved to the holster above his hip.

  Didier understood. He gazed at Nou’s photograph, feeling numb, almost calm. His thoughts were so far away, he didn’t register that Ratratarn had spoken again.

  ‘I said, walk towards the door.’

  Didier faced the policeman and looked at him hard. ‘I want you to realise,’ he said in English, ‘I know what’s going on here.’ And because he didn’t want the last face he saw to be that of his executioner, he glanced back at the photo of Nou, and one of Jayne on the wall beyond it.

  He whispered as he walked towards the door. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…’ He stopped and reached for the handle. ‘…I will fear no evil.’ The door opened and he passed through it. ‘For though art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’

  Why should those words come back to him now? It had been years since he’d set foot in a church.

  ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me...’ Was that a trigger being cocked, or the squeaking of the hinge? ‘…All the days of my life.’

  He crossed the balcony, paused at the top of the stairs and inhaled deeply. The night air smelled of jasmine, overripe mangoes, wet earth and a subtle note of human sweat. It was a scent he’d come to think of as Thailand.

  ‘And I will dwell in the house of the Lord…’

  He stepped forward to take the first stair.

  ‘…forever—’

  His foot never reached the ground.

  Jayne woke up frowning. She was baffled both by Didier’s behaviour the night before and her reaction to it. What had possessed him to try and seduce her? And why, when it was what she’d always wanted, had it left her feeling so uneasy?

  It was all mixed up in her head with Nou’s talk of marriage and babies. Jayne had left Australia because she baulked at getting on the marriage-mortgage-multiply treadmill, but five years on it worried her that she no longer had the choice. Perhaps she should consider a marriage of convenience with Didier since the normal route to parenthood seemed unlikely.

  But was that what she really wanted? Despite Didier’s suggestion that this could be ‘the start of something else’, Jayne didn’t believe he could turn for her. It was unfair for him even to imply it. And she didn’t think she could accommodate his needs, let alone his relationship with Nou: a ménage à trois in which she was the only party not having sex held no appeal at all. Perhaps her desires were more conventional than she wanted to admit.

  She splashed cold water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess of rained-on curls, exposing her forehead where the first, faint lines of ageing had started to appear. Purple crescents beneath her eyes made them look more yellow than amber. And due to lack of sleep, her heart-shaped face was paler than usual, making her freckles stand out.

  ‘You’re getting ahead of yourself, Keeney,’ she told her reflection.

  She rearranged her hair with a wide-toothed comb, and pinched her cheeks to put colour in them. As anxious as she was to sort things out with Didier, she needed coffee first.

  Jayne found a cafe near her hotel with tables on the street. She ordered coffee and, taking out her wallet, left her day-pack on a chair to reserve her place while she scanned the headlines of the Thai papers at an adjacent newsstand.

  ‘Local Boy Murdered’. She snatched a copy of Thai Rath and stared at the gruesome front-page photograph. A jacket covered the dead body’s face, though the mutilated groin was clearly visible in the picture. A policeman pointed to the corpse, as if to allay any doubts that the victim might still be alive. The image of the pointing policeman was a feature of Thai press photography that usually amused Jayne, but not now. There was something familiar about the setting, the coasters on the walls, the fountain in the background.

  In a sidebar was a small head-shot like a passport photograph with the caption ‘Sanga Siamprakorn: body found mutilated’. There was no mistaking it. Sanga—or Nou—was dead.

  She leaned against the counter and tried reading the small print for details, but although she spoke Thai with near fluency, the written language was another matter. It was taking too long and she had to get to Didier’s place. She couldn’t begin to imagine the state he’d be in.

  As she folded the paper, her eyes landed on a smaller headline near the bottom of the page, attracted by a single word she recognised easily. Farang. Foreigner. Jayne felt her stomach sink as she forced herself to translate the remaining words. She read ‘Foreign Suspect Killed Trying to Resist Arrest’, before the characters blurred on the page.

  Feeling a hand on her arm, she raised her head. The shopkeeper was staring pointedly at the newspaper in Jayne’s hand, her angular black eyebrows so close together it looked as if the letter M was painted on her forehead.

  ‘Kor thort na ka,’ Ja
yne stammered, wiping her eyes and fumbling for some change. ‘I’m sorry…’

  The woman looked up and the black M split apart. ‘Mai pen rai,’ she said, patting Jayne’s arm and giggling in the embarrassed way Thai people did in the face of grief. It was a custom Jayne had never been able to fathom, least of all now.

  She staggered back to her table where her coffee was waiting. The glare of the sun on the white tabletop hurt her eyes and she put on her sunglasses with shaky hands. Then she smoothed the paper out in front of her to translate the Thai script. It was easier to treat it as an academic exercise, consulting her pocket dictionary, detaching herself from the meaning of the English words as she wrote them in a notebook. She even managed to order a second coffee.

  Most of the front-page report was dedicated to graphic descriptions of Nou’s injuries. His body had been found, disfigured and dismembered, in a bar behind the Night Bazaar around 2.15 that morning. ‘Triangular shapes were carved into Khun Sanga’s face with what Scientific Crime Detection Division experts believe was a razor,’ Jayne wrote in her notebook. ‘Police believe the same weapon, which has yet to be found, was used to castrate the body. The male sex organ’—the paper used a formal term for penis that she’d never heard before—‘was found on the ground some distance from the corpse…’

  Jayne closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She knew the explicit detail, like the gruesome photography, was as an object lesson to remind Thai Buddhist readers of the impermanence of the flesh, but it was hard for her to take.

  Most of information about Didier was on page three.

  Tipped off by eyewitness accounts of a heated argument that took place between Khun Sanga and a foreign man, police proceeded to a house near the Muang Mai Market where they confronted the farang. When he tried to resist arrest, police opened fire, killing the suspect during his attempted escape. Sources say the man, Canadian expatriate Didier de Montpasse, was a known homosexual who was jealous of Khun Sanga.

  There were no photos of Didier, which suggested the news of his death hadn’t reached the paper until it was about to go to press. She’d left him just before midnight. Nou’s body had been discovered around two. What time had the police gone to Didier’s place?

  An image flashed into Jayne’s mind: Didier kissing her neck. Would he still be alive if she’d stayed with him last night? Or would she—?

  Jayne shook her head. She double-checked her translation, folded the paper and placed both in her backpack. Leaving a fifty baht note under her coffee cup, she began walking in the direction of the river, crushing mango rind and withered frangipani blossoms beneath her feet. She waved away tuk-tuk drivers who crawled along beside her, and there must have been something in her demeanour that made the beggars leave her alone. As she passed a temple, its mirrored mosaic shattered her reflection into pieces.

  When she looked up and saw the Rama IX Bridge, she realised she was on auto-pilot, walking to Didier’s house to keep their appointment. But Didier wouldn’t be there.

  Jayne sat down on the riverbank with her back against a tree and her head in her hands. It couldn’t be true. Not him—not Didier. Not dead.

  Hot, angry tears rolled down her face. How was it possible? Didier was a good man who tried to make the world a better place—unlike herself, who was content to profit from its flaws. It wasn’t fair.

  And what about her? How could he kiss her—almost make love to her—and then die? How was she supposed to make sense of what happened between them now? Guilt mingled with anger in her tears.

  When she finally raised her head, the sun was sliding towards the horizon. She had lost an entire day.

  The Ping River looked like molten bronze and the gilt-tipped spires of Chiang Mai’s temples sparkled in the dusky light. Such beauty seemed a travesty in the face of Didier’s death, and Jayne’s anger found a new target: she hated Chiang Mai.

  She scowled as she walked from the embankment to the road and waved down a tuk-tuk. To avoid conversation with the driver she pretended she couldn’t speak Thai, directing him in broken English back to the guesthouse.

  Komet frowned as he read over his report. Paperwork was arduous at the best of times. Not having slept in more than twenty hours made it more so. Most difficult was recording events he hadn’t actually witnessed. Still, Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn didn’t see it as a problem.

  ‘As soon as we get back to the station, you’re to write up what I’ve told you,’ he’d said as they waited for back-up to arrive. ‘It’s imperative we get it down quickly.’

  Komet complied, writing what he was told happened while he was searching the garden. Ratratarn said when he’d questioned the foreigner further the suspect admitted to being in the Man Date bar with the victim and confirmed they’d argued. When Ratratarn probed him as to the cause of the argument, the suspect became agitated and aggressive. Pointing to the photograph of the victim, he shouted that Khun Sanga was a bad person. Chua meuan mah was the exact phrase he’d used.

  The lieutenant colonel asked the suspect if Khun Sanga was ‘as bad as a dog’, did he deserve to die like one. The foreigner replied in the affirmative. The lieutenant colonel then suggested that the suspect had killed Khun Sanga.

  The suspect responded by rushing at Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn with raised fists. Caught unawares, the lieutenant colonel, though unhurt, was thrown off balance. By the time he righted himself, the suspect had run out the front door, clearly intending to avoid capture.

  Ratratarn said he called out for the man to stop as he was under arrest. When that failed to have an impact—by which point, the suspect had reached the top of the stairs— the lieutenant colonel fired a warning shot into the air. The suspect failed to stop and, as a last resort, Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn fired his pistol again, aiming to wound him in the leg. The foreigner stumbled on the stairs, however, and the shot caught him in the back. He was dead by the time Officer Komet, on hearing gunfire, rushed from the garden to the front of the house.

  Komet dutifully recorded this account of the events. His commander checked the draft and added a paragraph at the end.

  ‘It’s important we include all facts,’ Ratratarn said, handing the document back. ‘Since the case involves the death of a farang, we must anticipate some kind of inquiry. It’s a regrettable business, but since there were only two of us present, here’s hoping they’ll get through it quickly.’

  Komet returned to his desk and read Ratratarn’s amended conclusion: ‘Later asked by journalists at the scene whether he thought the suspect had committed the murder, Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn replied there was no doubt as to the foreigner’s guilt. “An innocent man would have done everything in his power to defend his innocence,” he said. He added that he regretted that the suspect’s death would not enable him to be brought to justice through the correct channels.’

  Komet typed up the changes, unable to shake the feeling that the lieutenant colonel didn’t regret the foreigner’s death nearly so much as he regretted the prospect of an inquiry.

  It was almost lunchtime when he submitted the finished report and stumbled home. With barely enough energy to greet his anxious wife, Komet fell into bed.

  He woke several hours later to the sound of the television. Arunee was sitting on the end of the bed, eyes glued to the screen. Komet reached for the remote and turned up the volume to hear the news presenter on Channel 4.

  ‘A Scientific Crime Detection Division representative has confirmed that a cut-throat razor found by police at the home of Canadian murder suspect Khun Didier de Montpasse bore traces of blood matching the type of murder victim, local boy Khun Sanga Siamprakorn. Police say they found the murder weapon wrapped in a plastic bag behind a water trough in the foreigner’s backyard.’

  ‘But that’s not—’ Komet began.

  ‘Hush,’ his wife stopped him. ‘I want to hear this.’

  At the next ad break, Komet staggered outside to the toilet, directing a stream of urine into the hole in the floor
. He flushed with a scoop of water from the adjacent tub and poured a second ladleful over his head. Rubbing his face, he tossed the dipper back, watching it bob on the surface.

  He could have sworn he’d checked the area behind the water trough at the foreigner’s house. Not only that: though Ratratarn said he’d fired twice and forensics found two spent cartridges at the scene, Komet remembered hearing only one gunshot.

  In hotel lobbies throughout Chiang Mai it was not unusual to see receptionists, bellboys, waiters and cleaners comatose in front of television soap operas and quiz shows, but it surprised Jayne to see the staff at the Silver Star transfixed by the local news. Glancing at the screen, she saw with a pang that it was an item about Nou and Didier. She removed her sunglasses.

  ‘Police say they found the murder weapon wrapped in a plastic bag behind a water trough in the foreigner’s backyard,’ a silver-haired anchorman in a brown suit said.

  The scene cut to a press conference at Police Bureau 5. A taut, hard-faced man in a skin-tight uniform, red braid coiled around one arm and fastened under an epaulet with a patchwork of coloured medals on his breast pocket, was surrounded by microphones. A caption identified him as Police Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn Rattakul in charge of the murder investigation. Jayne listened as he droned on about the results of forensic tests, before an off-screen journalist asked if the foreign suspect had committed the murder.

  ‘All the evidence points in that direction,’ Ratratarn said.

  ‘Have the police located any eyewitnesses?’ another asked.

  ‘Interviews are still under way.’

  ‘You’ve said you regret accidentally killing the suspect. Is this because there’s some doubt in your mind regarding the foreigner’s guilt?’

  Jayne stared at the man responsible for Didier’s death. When Ratratarn looked into the camera, it seemed as if he were staring right back at her.

  ‘There is no doubt in my mind as to the foreigner’s guilt,’ he said in a tone that defied anyone to question his judgment. ‘I regret only that the opportunity has been lost to punish the offender with the full force of the law.’