The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  And if, before the explosion, you had pressed on a hundred yards or so, to the most run-down set of three shacks, which nevertheless boasted, I am told, an American flag (postmen and visitors needed to know where “the Americans” were living), you would sooner or later have come across the three old farang who lived in them.

  As for the police, Klong Toey, as Vikorn pointed out, is not in District 8 and does not come under his jurisdiction, but even if it did, I doubt the Colonel, despite his contempt, would have done anything to interfere with the work of Sergeant “Lotus Bud” Satorn, whose nickname derives from his pious habit of ensuring that the house god who sits in the saan phra poom or spirit house at the northeast corner of his police cabin is well provided with this floral offering; one assumes the fat and otherwise cynical cop decided long ago that only the gods could save Klong Toey. To this end he has filled with Buddhas, shrines, and other religious artifacts those shelves and cupboards of his hut where less realistic cops might keep files.

  (I didn’t want to complicate the matter, but in the interests of faithful reporting I have to reveal that the Sergeant has, in fact, erected two spirit houses next to his cabin. One is set on a pillar taller and more elaborate than the other, and receives a double ration of lotus buds: this spirit is an avatar of Brahma and rides Erawan, a three-headed white elephant. The spirit who bivouacs in the second, smaller spirit house is merely a local deity whose peace was disturbed when people began building on the land and who charges rent, also in the form of lotus buds, until he gets his home back at the end of the world.)

  LB cheats, takes money from, bullies, occasionally beats up, and generally exploits the community he serves, but not to an exorbitant extent, and even our most avid reformers do not begrudge him the modest profit he is left with once his business associates have been paid off: that he keeps Klong Toey Slum together, one way or another, is enough of a contribution to eclipse his weaknesses. But I’m jumping ahead.

  —

  It was a pleasant morning in July, so I decided to approach KTC from the river. We were in the middle of the rainy season, which is the best time in Thailand. It is cooler, mornings can be sunny and balmy, and the rain, when it comes, usually does so at the same time every afternoon, so if you don’t like getting wet you can work around it. I took a cab to the port then persuaded the river cops to convey me to the best point from which to enter KTC. When they realized I’d come to meet Sergeant Lotus Bud himself, they dropped me off about twenty yards from the cabin he shared with two young constables.

  The trouble with short river trips in speedboats is that you always wish they would last longer. I was exhilarated by the damp wind in my face and the sense of freedom that comes from riding the great, bustling Chao Phraya and in a good mood by the time the Sergeant and I were waiing each other. He was of average height, triumphantly overweight with a thick leather belt (a Red Indian on the buckle), dark-skinned, in his fifties, big-faced, jovial, a bent cop from central casting who was as crooked as he needed to be to survive and carried no visible guilt or remorse for his contraventions. The great gift he brought to our profession was the common touch: the poor, the uneducated, the downtrodden, the just plain dumb all tended to love him. Ensconced in his cabin, he sat in an old big comfortable chair with huge cushions that billowed on either side, and he gave me a sideways glance as he picked up a mobile phone that lay on his desk and handed it to me. It was an iPhone and looked new. It was almost the latest model, a 5s no less. I switched it on, checked the log and looked for other relevant data, and found none. There were no messages, and only one entry in the Contacts file. It was a full international number beginning with the country code +84: Vietnam. No one had activated the phone’s Thai-language application. I looked at the Sergeant and shrugged.

  “The photos,” LB said. “Check the photos.”

  I checked the photos. There were about a hundred, and they all featured the same person. Me.

  —

  Now I was swivel-eyed and wired, switching between the Sergeant’s penetrating curiosity and the pictures, all of them taken on Soi Cowboy. I looked at the date and time on the photos. The dates suggested the photos were taken over a period of about two weeks, usually at around five in the evening, when I open my mother’s bar. I guessed Sergeant Lotus Bud was expecting a hasty explanation, perhaps even a confession from which he might one day profit: the suspicion that I, the only cop fluent in English in District 8, was involved in some kind of scam with the English-speaking owner of the phone was inevitable. My starting tactic was to let him see how baffled I was. Those slow eyes narrowed. Greed rode his neurons. He saw an opening.

  “Do you want to keep it? I’m supposed to hand it over to forensics.”

  “I want to keep it for the moment,” I snapped. The last thing I needed was for it to disappear into the hands of nerds for two weeks, who were quite capable of wiping the pix by mistake and then denying there were any in the first place.

  “But I’m supposed to hand it in,” he complained in an exaggerated tone of confusion and despair. When he added, “It’s the rule,” I knew where he was coming from.

  “I love the way you take care of your house gods,” I said, taking out my wallet. “Please let me buy a few garlands of lotus buds to help out.” I took out a thousand-baht note, held it between my palms while I stood up and stepped out of the cabin to wai the two statues. I tucked the money under a can of Nescafé that someone had given as an offering that morning.

  —

  The crime scene was also by the river, but quite a way from the police outpost, so the Sergeant and I took a stroll. To our right, the great slum opened to the high blue sky; to our left, the river so sacred to our ancestors and still so important to our rice exporters and their barges.

  They are gentrifying riverfront property these days, and I suppose capitalism will knock KTC down sooner or later and declare victory over squalor, but it’s a vast area with a lot of people to relocate to somewhere squalor-tolerant, so it’s not going to happen quite yet. Not if Sergeant Satorn has his way: he knew everyone. Betel-chewing old ladies gave him the high wai as if he were a revered monk; teenage girls on the game grabbed him around his vast stomach: he was the only father figure they had known. Young men about to shoot up saw him coming and disappeared down a dark alley; not-so-young men with serious crime on their minds were shrewd enough to give him big face by waiing and half bowing at the same time. Young mothers with dirty faces and screaming infants extracted small sums from him as he passed. Lotus Bud just loved being loved, although some of the attention he could have done without. When one of the crazy women called out, “Lotus,” he turned to smile, only to have her call it out again, in exactly the same tone, as if he hadn’t responded. And again and again, so a shrieked “Lotus” followed our steps as we proceeded. He scratched his head and shrugged.

  Now the crime scene started to announce itself. It was exactly as the Sergeant had described: as if a great wind from Jupiter came one day and simply blew away three shacks, smashing the wood beams into splinters, spreading the heavier items such as cooking stoves and pots around an area about twenty yards in diameter, and throwing the lighter things like books, toilet rolls, documents, and tubular chairs across a vast expanse. Already we were seeing splinters and papers from the explosion littering the footpath. Nothing lay smoldering, however, and there were no signs of things or people having been ripped up by shrapnel. When we arrived at the epicenter I saw men and women in white coveralls moving methodically over the area, probing with sticks, and occasionally bending down to pick something up. They were serious specialists from the antiterrorism unit, and I could see they had already decided there was nothing of interest to them there. There was a certain disdain in their postures and lack of enthusiasm: We trained all those months for a little toy bomb like this? The items they found of interest they laid out on a blue tarp spread on the ground. Automatically my eye checked through the items on the tarp, even as the detective in charge of
the investigation came to meet me.

  He was young and rendered suddenly insecure to find a more senior detective on the scene. The Sergeant, though, in my pay after accepting my modest bribe, explained about the cell phone, the photos, and why I was there. I was afraid some sinister suspicion would invade his young mind; it was, after all, more than a little strange, even in the context of local law enforcement, that I should have become part of the crime scene. But the detective, too, was overwhelmed by the sense that we were in a private kingdom run by the Sergeant in which anything could happen. On the other hand, those pictures of me on the smart phone needed to be dealt with in some way.

  “You don’t know who could have taken them?”

  “No idea.”

  “There’s no clue in the phone as to the identity of the owner?”

  “None at all.”

  The young detective was too Thai—too programmed by deference, in other words—to ask me to let him keep the phone. He waited for me to offer, but I changed the subject. He shrugged as if to say, You’re more senior than me, I can’t stop you.

  I left him to chat with the Sergeant while I walked along the side of the tarp.

  I was, as usual, quite solitary in my quest and wondering why this should be a recurrent theme of my life, when I remembered my new friend. Even on my most alienated days I’m never more than half a pariah; from a certain angle, depending on the light, I can appear quite normal and adjusted. Krom was, in a sense, a more pure form of the loner and therefore strangely comforting—even someone to look up to. I also wondered what she knew about the bomb, if anything. I took out my phone and called her. She answered on the second ring. I told her the story so far.

  “Photos of you on a cell phone?”

  “At the scene of the bomb at Klong Toey.” I spoke in a slightly accusatory tone, to indicate that I thought she must know something, then added, “The Colonel personally sent me over here. Way out of our jurisdiction, of course. But then, you and I first met on a matter out of the jurisdiction, didn’t we?”

  “Klong Toey?” She ignored the provocation and fell silent for a couple of beats. “That bomb was directed at farang—Americans, no?” I would classify her tone as wonder and surprise, rather than cynical foreknowledge.

  “Correct.”

  “Where are the Americans?”

  “In a government hospital—concussed. Two will definitely live, the third is in critical condition. All three have head injuries. Apparently they are all old men, well over sixty.”

  “And the phone is set up for English only?”

  “Correct.”

  Silence. “Sonchai, I don’t know anything about this.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re on your own here—it doesn’t fit with anything I’m working on.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you being sarcastic? You don’t believe me?”

  “You could at least speculate, given all that classified knowledge you’re going to share with me sooner or later, once I’ve been properly vetted—right?”

  Silence, then, “You’re smart, aren’t you? Just like they said you were. But maybe not that smart. I tell you all I can, probably more than I should. Could it be that I’m protecting you as well as myself? Do you think I’m not limited by need to know, just like everyone else?”

  I groaned. “Just give me a hint, would you?”

  “Those old Americans. They could be key, but I’m not sure. If they have connections to anywhere in Cambodia, follow up—but let me know first. That’s all I can say.” She closed the phone.

  I walked around the crime scene to rejoin young Detective Tassatorn and the Sergeant. There was no point in trying to examine any more of the debris, which included a great mass of papers and photos that were soggy from the water used to douse the embers and would probably fall apart if I tried to separate them from each other. Anyway, my line of inquiry had now shifted to the victims. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me directly to the government hospital where the three Americans were laid up.

  —

  They were in a secure ward: standard procedure in case of injury by explosions. You can have yourself shot by five fully automatic combat rifles and still not qualify for the secure ward; just one little homemade bomb, though, and you get the full treatment: metal detectors at the door, grim and very bored security, medical staff not happy that in addition to risking death by disease every day of their working lives they have to risk being blown up by bomb-toting terrorists and—perhaps worse—follow strict government security guidelines.

  The first two beds on the ward were occupied by two Buddhist teachers who had been sent to the Islamic south to teach in government schools and within weeks became victims of the troubles down there. The Islamic resistance doesn’t like to see its territory seduced by Buddhist do-gooders, so a teaching assignment in Yala, Pattani, or any of the Islamic provinces is a dangerous posting that can amount to a death sentence. I was depressed to see their heads and eyes bandaged and remembered my uncle’s phrase, connoisseurs of bitterness, but strode onward to the other end of the ward where the Americans lay on their backs.

  Question: how do you tell one American from another when they are all over sixty and have their heads, eyes, and half their faces covered in bandages? A male nurse came to find me while I was staring at them. In Thai script, the legend on the clipboards at the end of the bed was strange. It referred to each patient by his hospital registration number, then gave one of three possible names in English: William J. Schwartz; Laurence Krank; Harry Berg. In other words, nobody knew who was who. They were all in comas of various degrees of depth.

  “It’s not unusual, especially with the old, for people to remain in a coma after traumatic shock for days, even weeks, then recover totally,” the nurse explained. “These two,” he added, pointing, “have no damage to the skull at all, only the skin. They will recover soon. This one, though,” he said, pointing at the last bed, “we’re not sure. He was blown back by the blast and hit his head on something hard. There’s quite a lot of swelling. If it gets worse we might have to break open the skull to release the pressure.” Now he came to the punch line and I understood why he was being so helpful. “That’s a long, expensive operation, because after we release the pressure we have to use plates to screw the pieces of skull back together again.”

  I stared at the implacable mummies lying on the bed. A sentimental fantasy crossed my mind as I looked at them. No—I half smiled at myself—coincidences like that don’t happen in real life. On the other hand, a cynical but inevitable thought slipped past the internal defenders of the soul: If one of them is him, I sure hope it’s not the one with the brain damage. Then a third thought came flying out of left field: Could that be why the anonymous gray men pulling all our strings are interested in me? Because of him? But why? And if so, which him? And who, actually, is calling the shots?

  “What shall I say to the Registrar?” the nurse was asking. “There are funds for the operation or not?”

  I stared at the old man in the bed and allowed that thought to resurface: Supposing, just supposing…After all, one of those guys had taken more than a hundred shots of me on Soi Cowboy, hadn’t they? Or had they? Now was the time to test Vikorn, force him to reveal his hand just a tad.

  I fished out my cell phone to call him. I told him of a patient/victim who might need extensive brain surgery and suggested he might like to help out with the expenses. That he even hesitated told me that he somehow knew more about the bomb at Klong Toey than anyone else I’d talked to that day. He said, “Okay, I’ll have Manny deal with it.”

  “What about the other two—they’re not thought to be in serious danger, but I guess you’d want to keep them all together?”

  A normal reaction would have been for him to say, No, what the hell for?

  “Sure,” he said, “have all three moved to the international hospital at Hua Lamphong. They do a lot of brain stuff there.”

  “Yes,�
� I told the nurse, “there are funds—but are you equipped for such an operation? Should we think of moving him somewhere else?”

  The nurse smiled with relief. “Oh, yes, that is good news. One of the big international hospitals will have all the machines and the expertise. We don’t have any specialist brain surgeons here.”