The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “That’s her,” Ruamsantiah said, and pulled the door open.

  —

  She was average height for a Thai woman, about five three, in her late twenties or early thirties. As far as I could tell she was pretty in a sharp-featured kind of way, but her personality hit you before you had a chance to concentrate on her sex appeal. Even without the cute black-rimmed spectacles, like miniature windows smeared with rain, you would have guessed she was a smart cookie from the new generation of Thais. She did not want to climb into the van. Instead, she jerked her chin toward the river and led us toward it. Her own van was about a hundred yards away, invisible in the dense mist. When he saw us her driver opened the sliding door. The Sergeant and I held back for her to enter first, but she shook her head to make us precede her. We obeyed.

  Inside a van rocked by gusts we introduced ourselves. Her name was Krom, Inspector Krom. When she pulled back the hood I saw how close-cropped was her spiky black hair. I told her what I had just seen on the river, half hoping she would have some happy explanation, although I couldn’t think of one myself.

  “I know,” she snapped. She jerked her head at the front bench of the vehicle where her driver was sitting and called my attention to the outsize gadget clamped onto the dashboard. I’d already stored the impression that it was bigger and stranger than any GPS or satellite navigation instrument I’d seen in a police van before, but technology rules by outpacing us a little more each day. Now that I examined it more carefully I saw it had some unusual black buttons with Chinese characters stamped on them in white.

  Inspector Krom ordered the driver to join us in the back. He got out and reemerged at the rear door, soaked from the ten-second exposure to the storm. Then the Inspector beckoned the Sergeant and me to move forward to the front bench with her, while she sat dripping in the driver’s seat. Now she was manipulating the buttons.

  “We have it on the hard disk,” she said. “About five minutes ago, right? When the mist cleared. This machine automatically switches between radar and video. The video is in color, quadruple HD, with about a thousand dots per inch, that’s nearly double the pixel density of the most advanced screens and cameras commercially available. They’re keeping the technology secret for the moment.”

  “Radar, too? I didn’t know satellites used it.”

  She jerked her chin at the gadget. “Synthetic aperture radar: SAR. It can penetrate cloud, even the earth up to about six inches. The Chinese were allowed to steal it from the U.S.”

  She cast me a glance, aware, I suppose, of how odd the phrase allowed to steal sounded. Also, how was I to react to the information that we were using the “borrowed” Chinese version of the gadget?

  “Intelligence is complicated. Actually, it’s a mess. The most overgoverned democracy in the world privatizes government so they can pretend they’re not overgoverned. The most crowded nation juggles about fifty local governments with the population of large countries. Of course it’s all out of control.” I thought I detected genuine irritation when she added, “And everything they say, everything they do, is said and done in a spirit of absolute denial of the truth. We’re screwed. There!”

  She had mastered the controls and now we were looking at a replay of what I had just witnessed on the river. Perhaps the clever machine had a way of enhancing its own video, or perhaps the weird clarity of that fleeting moment had made the scene unusually photogenic; either way, the definition, detail, and color were amazing as I watched a replay of the double murder by drowning.

  “You know who these people are?” I asked.

  “Yes. The two Thai men are low-grade thugs.” She paused the video and turned to stare at me. “You just saw the older one throw his wife overboard, mother of his three kids. The younger one drowned his own mother.”

  “WHAT?” I glared at her, refusing to believe what I had heard.

  Sergeant Ruamsantiah stiffened on the bench next to me. We exchanged a glance. I shivered. “Could you say that again?” the Sergeant asked.

  “No. You heard it right.”

  “Play it one more time,” he said. He didn’t care that she was superior in rank to him; that was an order. She replayed the video: there was no doubt about it, a Thai man about thirty years old threw a woman his own age into the raging torrent. At the same time a young man in his twenties drowned a middle-aged woman. The Sergeant was still not satisfied and neither was I. We didn’t say so, but he wanted proof that what the Inspector had said was true. In Thailand matricide is virtually unknown. It is one of those crimes so extreme, inviting a sentence of millions of years in a hell starker than stone, before the perpetrator reemerges in some primitive life form, that most of us, including me, believe it to be exclusively Western. Inspector Krom, though, seemed to take the unnatural crime in her stride.

  “That’s as much as you saw, right?” she asked me.

  “Yes. After that the wind died and the fog returned.”

  “So, here’s the continuation in real time. It will have to be radar, which is monochrome, because of the mist. Look.”

  I studied the screen, now black and white, as the tall farang threw off his padded parka to reveal a magnificent torso under a black T-shirt, removed his pants leaving boxer shorts, took a couple of paces to the stern, poised like a professional swimmer, and dived elegantly into the churning water. The two Thai men stared after him but made no effort to move.

  “Who in hell is that?” I muttered.

  “I don’t know his real name, if he has one.” The Inspector waited to see if I would react to that. I didn’t. “They call him the Asset. Or, if you prefer, Goldman’s Asset—that could be changing, though.”

  “What could be changing?”

  “Goldman’s ownership of his Asset.”

  “Who is Goldman?”

  Krom played with the buttons some more to change focus. Now we were looking at a great shadowy hulk standing on the riverbank no more than a hundred yards from where the van was parked. Even in monochrome with nobody around to compare him with he appeared gigantic, in a weatherproof jacket the size of a bedsheet, hands in his pockets, thinning hair blown about by the wind.

  “Meet Joseph George Goldman,” Krom said. “Former CIA officer, retired.” She cast us a glance. “He still works for them, though. On contract.” I looked at her, waiting for more. “He’s too old, really, but they can’t do without him.”

  “Why?”

  “Wait and see.”

  “This is the weirdest day,” I muttered. “Really, the weirdest day of my entire career.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m investigating a murder by beheading that happened last week in the market behind the police station. Suddenly I’m told to come here in this filthy storm. When I asked if it was related, the Colonel said he wasn’t sure. Now two women are murdered—drowned—with no clear motive and no reason for supposing there’s a link with the case I’m working on.”

  “Get used to it,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged, as if to say that if I didn’t understand yet, I soon would.

  Now she manipulated the radar to return to the river. She used the boat as a point of reference—the two men were huddled in the stern, pressing their bodies together to make one dark heap—then tracked across the river until she located a blob in the water. It was the tall blond farang who I’d decided was as good as dead. No one survives that kind of current, that kind of flood. Buddha knew how many tons of violent water would be brought to bear on a frail human form, no matter how much iron those muscles had pumped.

  But he wasn’t dead or even in trouble. He disappeared from the screen perhaps a dozen times, when it was unclear if he had drowned or if the mist had simply engulfed him; then, with a regularity that became increasingly improbable, the cropped bullet head would reappear a couple of yards nearer the bank. Sure, the flood was taking him downstream, but the fact that he was able to fight the current and remain almost at the same point on the river spoke o
f an unbelievable strength and endurance. When the Inspector switched back to Goldman, that giant, we watched him walk parallel to the bank to reach a point downstream from the swimmer. At the same time he removed his jacket and let the wind take it. Now Joseph George Goldman stood in a huge dark T-shirt and a knotted rope wrapped just under his gut. This he unwound as he walked. When the swimmer was near enough to the bank for the American to predict where he would make contact with the wall, Goldman secured one end of the line to a steel upright and let the other down the side of the bank. The swimmer reached the wall about twenty yards upstream and allowed the current to bounce him against it until he reached the rope, which he immediately wound around himself. He paused for a couple of minutes before hauling himself up.

  Now I was sure he was not human. The swim was impressive enough, but to retain the strength to haul his considerable bulk up the vertical rope quickly and easily for about thirty feet without a pause, even with the help of the knots…that spoke of something else.

  “Like something out of a superhero comic,” I muttered to Krom, who gave me a curious look.

  When the swimmer popped his head over the embankment I expected the two Americans to embrace to celebrate the athlete’s survival, or at least make high fives, but as soon as Goldman saw that his man was safe on the bank he beckoned him to follow as he returned with long, hurried strides to the first rope that was holding the boat with the Thais on board. I could not help staring at the physical prodigy on the screen who had just swum across our wildest river in a rage. I wondered why he didn’t lie down on the sidewalk, or at least lean against the railings breathing heavily. He simply followed the huge American at a kind of warm-up trot until he joined him at the stanchion to which the line was tied fast.

  A sudden squall began to tear the mist into floating filigree. The Satnav machine fired up those pixels as it switched automatically to color. The definition of the Chinese gadget was amazing in its precision: every shade, every facial expression, every detail was better than the best HD I’d seen. There was even a touch of the surreal in its precision, as if we had those people in a box right on the dashboard of the van.

  Goldman stood upright and seemed to yell something at his Asset at the same time as handing him some object that looked like a Swiss Army knife from his pants pocket, then clapped his hands. I frowned in disbelief. Inspector Krom played with the controls to zoom in on what he was doing.

  What I retain of that moment is the precision with which the swimmer cut the rope. He sawed away while bending over it, like a man who is determined to do a perfect job. He stepped back the instant the rope started to fray of its own accord. The strands unraveled: the rope and the boat were gone.

  “We’ll have to get out of here before they see us,” the Inspector muttered. “This isn’t meant to be a demonstration. Now it’s all over, they might start looking around. It’s important they don’t know we’re here.” But she made no effort to move just yet. Instead we watched the huge old American and his young prodigy giving the raging torrent one last glance. “I guess even if they do look this way, all they’re going to see is a wet van.”

  The younger man was stunning in his beauty, with a perfect physique, about six two with Hollywood good looks and cropped hair so blond it was almost white. Still soaked in shorts and T-shirt, he didn’t even shiver. When he looked up at the sky for a brief moment I saw eyes of mystic cornflower blue. But he seemed to give off nothing in the way of vibrations or mood, like someone emotionally invisible.

  Inspector Krom, her tongue pressing against her front teeth, began to pan across the scene until she found what she wanted and grunted in satisfaction. Now we were looking at a camera team of two huddled on a bridge upstream. Their camera with giant zoom on a tripod was focused like a cannon on the point at which Goldman and his disciple were standing. They were so done up in padded waterproofs that they were bloated spheres; no mistake about it, though, they were both Chinese. What kind of camera could focus in that mist, I wondered. Infrared? Ultraviolet? Laser?

  Now Inspector Krom made a sweep of the river where the incident had taken place, then panned inland a bit. I guessed she was looking for Goldman’s transport. And there it was, all of a sudden, so perfectly incongruous that she had to return to it a couple of times: a sky-blue Rolls-Royce, with two men standing together, apparently taking advantage of a break in the weather. One of them was a liveried chauffeur, the other was bulky in a light cream Burberry done up to the neck and a tan fedora pulled over his eyes, long hair held back with a clip. There was no mistaking him. Even if the limousine and the chauffeur had not given him away, the Brahmin posture, and above all that famous ponytail, made it as certain as it was strange.

  “Lord Sakagorn?” I muttered. “What the hell…”

  “He’s Goldman’s legal counsel. Buddha knows why he would compromise himself like this.” Krom shook her head. She didn’t understand any more than I did.

  The weather changed again and visibility dropped to near zero. The Inspector nodded at us. It was time for every cop to leave the scene. The Sergeant and I returned to our own van and Ruamsantiah drove us home. We were silent all the way. I know the Sergeant was plagued by the same thought as me: had some Black Death of the soul stowed away on the ship that brought us Facebook and Twitter?

  2

  The next morning I’m sitting at my desk in the station reading my usual online newspapers: Thai Rath and the Bangkok Post. Both carry photos of a hired boat smashed up on the riverbank. (Bear with me here, R: when memory excites I revert to the present tense, which is pretty much all we use in Thai. It’s always now, after all. FYI, I’m actually in a cell in the police station writing this narrative while my cigarettes are baking in the canteen’s oven: I’ll explain later.) Ferocious currents carried it downstream at a thirty-mile-an-hour clip before it crashed into a container vessel moored at the port at Klong Toey. Tragically, according to the report, the two women were thrown overboard into the raging torrent when the boat hit an unknown object in the water, while the two men hung on. The drowned female bodies were found a few miles downstream. The two men, it seemed, died in the collision with the ship.

  Now Vikorn’s secretary, Manny, calls me: “He wants to see you.”

  —

  I climbed the stairs, knocked, entered, walked across the room to stand near his desk—and waited. The Old Man was standing at a window looking down on the cooked-food vendors on the street below. He might have been one of Asia’s richest kingpins and a feudal baron of the old kind, but he never forgot he was a son of the common people. The street vendors had been illegal for three decades, but the Colonel defended them against attack from every quarter of the bureaucracy, from Roads and Bridges to Public Health to traffic engineers and urban planners. By special arrangement he had his khao kha moo (stewed pork leg with rice) sent up on a signal from his window. The Isaan vendors would have gladly sent it without charge, or even with a modest bribe of thanks for his support over the years, but he would have none of it. He had Manny pay his khao kha moo bill regularly every week plus ten percent for the delivery.

  I had spent more than fifteen years bound in medieval service to this man, he dominated my life and mind, and I was as sensitive to his moods as a timid wife; at least that’s the way it had been until now. Gossips said it was the onset of senility, the way he had seemed to diminish recently. I didn’t buy that. Tyrants like him go raging into the night; the only thing that brings them down is the tyranny of greater tyrants. For the first time in living memory someone or something bigger was winning, and he was losing—that was my analysis anyway.

  There were three basic postures he adopted when staring out of this particular window: with cigar (mood climate here ranges from contented to gloating); with hands in pockets (contemplative, confidently waiting the next brilliant, criminal idea to enter his head); and frowning with hands on hips (not a good sign; trouble ahead). To these three mental states, common enough in our species, I must add an
other, for today he kept turning his face to the sky in the posture of a humble old man begging the gods for help. Here was criminal genius unmasked: ego stripped bare for the sake of survival, all self-love dumped unceremoniously as one might jettison a fur coat to avoid drowning. He knew I was standing near him but allowed a good five minutes to pass before he came back to earth to address me.

  “I heard about what happened yesterday,” he said and paused. “If you speak of it to anyone, the Americans will take you out. On the other hand, the Chinese want you to continue with your investigation into the Market Murder—that Nong X case.”

  This was the first official indication that there might be a connection between the Market Murder last week and the events on the river yesterday. In my mind I had tried to connect the unusual strength of the blond young man on the boat and the decapitation of Nong X, but there was no evidence to justify such a theory. After inspecting the crime scene, Sergeant Ruamsantiah had tried to take witness statements from the crowd around the roti vendor. Nobody knew anything. The best lead, if you could call it that, was a remark from the roti vendor to the effect that the house was managed by a middle-aged woman who sold watches in the market. That’s all he knew. Despite my detailing a team of ten constables to ask questions all over the market for the past three days, there were no other leads at all. I didn’t even have any information as to why the girl was in the apartment at that time. In a last desperate attempt to move the case forward I had the men put up lurid posters all over the market, asking for anyone with information to come forward. So far nobody had.