The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  She grunted, then said, “You didn’t hear that from me.”

  She stood up to pay with a hundred-baht note. So far the short sleeves of her uniform had been long enough to cover her arms down to the elbow; now I saw there was a sharp border between the light tan flesh of the forearm and the dense blue of some serious damascene inkings.

  “You have full-body?”

  The question shocked her for a moment; she hurriedly lowered her hand and pulled her sleeve down.

  “It’s when you stand up to pay like a man that you give the game away,” I said with a smirk.

  She threw me a glare and sat down again. “Yes. Full-body.” She shook her head, angry at herself for being careless and giving her secret away.

  She frowned, laid the hundred-baht note on the table for a moment, and reached into a pocket. She took out a thumb drive. “I knew we were going to be working together, so I brought this in case our conversation went well. A moment ago I thought I’d wait a while. Now you’ve seen the tat, though, you may as well have it. Just so you know.” She handed over the thumb drive. “Share it with your wife. If she needs any reassurance about you and me working together, this will give it to her—big time.”

  I looked her in the eye as I took it. Then she held out a hand that, I suspect, she would have liked to be bigger and more masculine. As a matter of fact, it was small, slim, and very elegant; no rings, though. I shook it. Now she had one more shock for me.

  “Ah, just so you know I know—your little weakness for weed—do I need to say more?”

  “What weakness?”

  “C’mon, Detective, everyone knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Your Achilles’ heel, man. Yes, you are straight, honest, compassionate, never take money unless Vikorn forces you, and even then you never keep any for yourself. You are notorious for not being on the take. But that sets up quite a psychological strain that’s hard to handle without help. Then there’s your permanent search for your biological father. Everyone knows about that.”

  “They do?”

  “Yep.”

  I scratched my ear. “So?”

  “So I have something for you.”

  She dug into a pocket and took out a vial like a test tube filled with a golden-green liquid. “I made some up, just for you, as a token of our new friendship.”

  I stared at the test tube, then at her. “What is it?”

  “Oil,” she said.

  “THC?”

  “What else? Do you know how to use it? You dip a cigarette in it then warm the cigarette in an oven at not more than a hundred degrees Celsius until it’s dry—any hotter and you’ll kill the THC.”

  I shook my head. THC: of course, what else? I slipped it into my pants pocket.

  —

  Back at the station I sat at my post in the open-plan office, checked e-mail, checked the news again, went through the usual kind of distractions while another part of my mind scratched incessantly at a couple of key phrases Inspector Krom had inserted into our conversation: weakness for weed; your Achilles’ heel, man; search for your biological father.

  I slapped the top of my desk, causing the cop at the desk nearby to look up and scowl. I rose to my feet.

  “If anyone wants to know, I’ve gone to see Dr. Supatra, the pathologist,” I told him. He scowled again and went back to his screen. I had interrupted his game of Angry Birds.

  —

  To know you are a little odd, that you do not possess the full complement of antecedents, complications, traps, and habits that constitute normal—that is one thing. To be told by a stranger that your own strangeness is obvious, to have it explained to you that you are one of those with a gaping wound, moreover, that is talked about openly behind your back—that is quite another number to crunch on. My nerves did not begin to relax until I was a good few hundred yards from the station, on the way to the pathologist’s laboratory. I liked the anonymity of the street. I always had. Even as a kid I’d been addicted to long walks late at night in the city that never sleeps. In the small hours of the morning it was possible to imagine that those who were still awake were of my own kind: pariahs. I liked Inspector Krom’s tattoo. I admired her courage. I feared her ruthlessness.

  3

  Dr. Supatra also was odd, but that worked fine for her. All medical examiners are weird, it’s expected of them. Death is a forbidden country for most people, especially in a superstitious culture such as ours. Supatra, under five foot, slight, long-faced with the intensity of a witch, fitted her profession so well that cops who worked with her saw in her a kind of archetype, as if all pathologists must be cut from the same pattern. She scowled then checked my face with those intense black eyes. There was no point trying to hide.

  “You’re sleeping? You look exhausted. Are you taking those pills I gave you? Don’t take too many, you can’t escape nightmares forever. Coming to terms is the only escape.”

  “I know, it’s in the Pali Canon.” I let a beat pass. “You saw the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Those two families who drowned.”

  “The ones on that boat? What about them?”

  “The young man drowned his mother. I saw him. The other drowned his wife, mother of his kids.”

  She gave me a sharp look. “That wasn’t reported.”

  “No.”

  I told her what I had witnessed the day before. She listened carefully, absorbing each word and savoring it. Then she shook her head. “This is the tipping point, societies fall so far, then they fall apart. This is known. It’s in the literature. Be thankful you’re no longer young. Why are you here, anyway?”

  “I need to see the body again.”

  “Which bits? I’ve put the head and torso in separate drawers. You know what I think.”

  “You think an extraterrestrial did it.”

  “What else has that kind of strength? What else gets into that kind of frenzy? Humans can’t pull heads off the bodies of other humans, it’s impossible, too many sinews, muscles, bones. Maybe you could find an iron pumper who could do such a thing, but it would have been even uglier—the perp here was so strong he pulled the head off almost surgically. It’s a terrible thing to say, but this beheading with bare hands was almost elegant—along with the handwriting.”

  “We don’t have extraterrestrials in Thailand. They always prefer the West—name one extraterrestrial who has landed in Asia instead of America or Europe?”

  “Siberia,” she said without hesitation. “Some landed in Siberia in a spaceship that burned up a whole acre of steppe. There’s a clip on YouTube.”

  “Siberia is thousands of miles north of here.”

  “So it was a demon beheaded the girl. That’s why you have to investigate. How far have you got?”

  “Unclear,” I admitted. “I suspect but dare not arrest. I need something nobody can argue with. What happened with that one blond hair they found, about an inch long you said?”

  “Still testing. All they know is it’s not human. It’s the strongest damn hair they’ve ever seen—can’t pull it apart. They’ve sent it to some fancy forensic lab in the U.S.”

  I followed her to the great wall of steel drawers and stood by while she opened one.

  When I had come to terms with the full horror of the case, I had realized that the head, or, to be precise, the face, was the biggest mystery. When Supatra opened the drawer it was exactly as I remembered from last time: the head of a young woman or girl, Southeast Asian, eyes closed, almost serene, like a Buddha image, pale and frosty from the refrigeration. I had ransacked past cases and found nothing relevant. The only case thrown up by research that bore any resemblance was of a religious fanatic in the sixties in the U.K., a gay man who had cut off the head of his guru lover and was found by police cradling it in his arms. He explained that the head was the only part he could respect and revere, the rest was animal. I paused over the long neck and remembered the Long Neck women of the Karen tribe: but they took
a decade to stretch their necks using brass rings they added one by one every year. I shook my head, then searched Supatra’s grim face.

  “Like this,” she said. “Don’t think I haven’t obsessed, too. This is the only way he could have done it to have such a result.” In a moment of physical intimacy that was almost alarming, the Doctor placed a tiny hand at the base of my neck and squeezed. “Imagine my hand is like a big steel pincer,” she said, “like a crab’s claw. So I dig into the flesh with my nails, which are sharp enough to cut skin and minor muscles. Then I snap the vertebra at C5, twist until the head is facing backward, and then simply push.” She was now trying to push my head off using her second hand under my chin while the first remained clamped to my lower neck and squeezing hard as if trying to cut the sinews with her nails. I experienced not the slightest fear that she could do any serious harm. “You get the picture? That’s why the neck is so stretched. But no normal man could do it. It’s not just a question of strength; arms and hands are simply not designed for such a feat. It’s not how we evolved.”

  “But the face is not damaged.”

  “Right. That’s part of the point. The only way he could have left the face undamaged is by doing it the impossible way I just showed you.”

  “Shouldn’t she be bloated from suffocation?”

  “She didn’t suffocate. I think she fainted, then died as soon as he broke her neck. No fighting for air, no bloating. There are no signs of resistance.”

  “Meaning she knew her assailant?”

  “Not necessarily. It could be that the assault happened so fast with an assailant so powerful there was no time or opportunity to resist.”

  Supatra closed the drawer.

  “The video,” I said.

  She shook her head at me, then took me to her office.

  “You’re here to investigate or torture yourself? Take a copy, I have a thumb drive you can borrow.”

  “I don’t want it in my house,” I said. “I’m superstitious.”

  “So you’re a normal Thai man after all. Have you been to temple? Have you talked to a monk? Did you go to see that mordu I told you about?”

  “I saw him just for ten minutes—he said to come back.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She clicked a few times on her desktop until she found the video that the forensic team had made. The video shook somewhat at first due to the operator’s shock. He was careful, though, to follow the rule: a meticulous panning from left to right, covering the crime scene like a lawn mower so nothing was left out. It took less than five minutes. At the end the video concentrated on the walls, which were bare plaster save for the blood splatter. The video recording halted at the mirror, however, and hovered there. English characters that were not crude or childish, but quite elegant: Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is.

  I had come to the morgue as a kind of check of myself. I wanted to know if I had hardened enough to carry on. The Doctor, also, was interested to know the answer to this question. In my opinion the experiment was inconclusive. I was shaking, but not quite as much as before. I even managed a grim smile.

  “I would like a still of the handwriting,” I said.

  Supatra clicked on her mouse a few times until her printer produced a copy of the writing on the mirror and handed it to me. “What use is a handwriting expert? It’s the one form of communication even the NSA doesn’t collect.”

  “I know. But they can tell likely level of education, cultural origins, even certain character traits.”

  “Sure, that will narrow it down to a few million. Better you go see the mordu. A clairvoyant would be more specific. Okay, I’m a scientist, but I’m still Thai. I’ve never seen such an obvious piece of black magic in my life. I was joking about extraterrestrials, actually this whole case has Khmer written all over it. Go see the holy man, there’s no one else.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said, thanked her, and left.

  Out on the street I waited for a taxi to take me across the river. Perhaps it sounds odd to you, R, that in a difficult case one should ask for occult help, but for us it’s really not so strange, though we don’t normally tell farang like you about it. To suppose that humans are rational is a largely Western superstition to which most Asians are resistant. After all, if reason has failed in this case, that must be because reason isn’t powerful enough to penetrate the mystery, mustn’t it? Clearly, I need something with more chili. I’m off to see the wizard. All the best seers live on the west bank, known as Fangton.

  In the taxi I replay those bloody words for the thousandth time: Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is. A couple of days ago I put the phrase through a simple computer test. On the assumption that the smudge is a word erased and that the writer was using grammatically correct English, there are not many alternatives: in all likelihood the missing word would be an article or a pronoun: my, your, his, her, their, the, our. None of them would surprise in an ordinary case of murder by a disorganized psychopath. In the case of an organized mind, though, only two would really make sense; either Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who your father is, which would not normally be an important enough message to write in blood, or Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who our father is. That would at least be a revelation worth making; in the mind of a certain kind of psycho, it might even be worth murdering for.

  Now as my mind relaxed in the back of the cab it started to gnaw on something Inspector Krom had said with that in-your-face directness that takes no prisoners: Then there’s your permanent search for your biological father. Everyone knows about that.

  4

  R, did you know your same-sex parent when you were growing up? If you did not, then my song will be familiar: I never stopped looking for him, from the minute I realized he was missing. All the kids at infant school had a dad, why not me? Therefore the previous thirty-seven years had been rich in daddy substitutes, most of them from my imagination. All I had to go on was Vietnam: a good-looking Yank in his early twenties, face blackened with war (sometimes); a charmer of women (Mum in particular). Because his English was perfect, so mine had to be. Should I thank him for opening my mind to farang confusion? I’m not sure, but how else were my fantasy dads going to communicate with me or I with them? He sure didn’t speak Thai worth a damn, I had Mama Nong’s testimony to rely on there.

  Sometimes I made him muscle-bound like those GIs you see in the Museum of American War Atrocities in Saigon (of course I went, long before they renamed it so they could trade again with Uncle Sam—it’s still there if you don’t believe me). I found one in a photo on the wall of a soldier with arms so powerful he looked incomplete without something heavy to lift. When I realized I wasn’t built that way I slimmed my dream dad down a bit. I kept him at average height, calculating that I was going to be tall for a Thai anyway, and who wants to stick out at age thirteen? Then, when I realized how important brains were, I made him smart, really smart. To justify my daydreams I read and read—and did extra well at school and started to imagine that maybe Einstein had paid a visit to Soi Cowboy sometime in the seventies and had an adventure with a bar girl named Nong; until I realized how smart Mum was (Mama Nong learned to speak English faster than me and she didn’t even have an American dad); my smarts didn’t necessarily prove a thing about him. And so on. I drove myself crazy trying to find some trait of body or mind, anything that I could point to about myself and say, That’s from him. Did I become a detective in order one day to find him? I’m not sure. Certainly, I was tormented at an earlier age than most by the conviction that it was possible to discover who I was. Did such an absurd idea originate in your hemisphere, R?

  Sometimes my search hurt so much I’d confide in Mum. Tell me, I’d say, tell me, just one thing that is definitely him not you? She didn’t answer for years, until the girls in the bars started passing on stories about me. “That,” she said, pointing at my crotch. “Al
l men have it, but not all have it that bad. That’s him all right.”

  “He was really as bad as me?” I asked, somewhat troubled by the thought.

  “Worse.”

  “And you put up with it?”

  “It was the seventies, there was a war on, I was a bar girl, there were thousands of us, you were grateful even for the chance to compete.”

  “But you loved him, you told me. I asked you a million times, and that’s the only question you’ve ever given a consistent answer to.”

  “I was a country girl. In the country you judge the male by its virility and the female by its fecundity. You could say he was a prizewinning buffalo, gold medal, any farmer’s pride and joy, deprive him of sex for a night and he’d tear the shed down. Sure I was proud of him. Proud as hell that he stayed with me, took me to America, once—that alone raised me to queen-of-the-village status. And he shared. He was generous. Almost as generous with his dough as with his sperm—and that’s saying a lot.”

  “You were in love with his dick, then?”

  “You want a whack?”

  She was tough. Looking back, it can make me laugh how she played the fragile Oriental lotus to soak the johns. Like all Thai women, she was master of the art of flattery. Not a customer she slept with whom she didn’t compliment on the size of his member, however diminutive: Wow! Honey, I don’t think I’ve seen one that big before—was she thinking of Dad as she flicked those flagging phalli back to life? There are questions even sons like me don’t ask, but the fact speaks for itself: she only let herself fall pregnant the once. Only one man she so honored. Why him?

  So, although I never got used to being without him, I did get used to always having a make-believe him to turn to as a role model. In fact I had a whole wardrobe of hims who I could wear depending on the need of the hour—e.g., strong, resolute, honest, the best kind of American—especially when I started as a cop. H/we grew partial to weed at an early age, though, and loved stealing cars (just a phase h/we went through, you understand). And when I doubted the historical accuracy of my invented progenitor, I had the brothels to turn to. There I always could find him, so to speak. I knew his excitement when a new, extra-delicious girl appeared on the revolving stages; I understood the profound respect he felt for the way she kept her dignity—and held out for the dough. I experienced that inexplicable compulsion to see just one more naked young woman on a bed waiting for me, like the drunk who needs just one more drink. That, basically, is all I have of Dad.