The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “And Goldman has found a way around that?”

  “That’s his claim. That’s really what he’s selling. But he didn’t solve the problem, he didn’t have any idea how to go about it, until he teamed up with the Brit shrink.”

  “Can you tell us a little more?”

  “You have to bear in mind that this is just speculation—I don’t have a very high security clearance. As far as I understand it, the point is learning and adaptation. If through training from birth you can produce a mind at once robust and flexible enough to cope with the enhanced cognitive power, then you really do reach a kind of grail.”

  “How so?”

  “Because there is really only one way a personality can cope, and that is by riding an extraordinary learning curve. It’s a form of self-evolving AL—accelerated learning—that achieves the gold standard of infinite evolution at speeds hundreds if not thousands of times faster than anything our species has achieved so far. ALE in the jargon: accelerated learning enhancement.”

  “From human to god in one generation?”

  “Or to monster.” She turned from the window, smiled formally at the two of us, and resumed her seat.

  The Colonel and I let a good five minutes pass. Finally Vikorn cleared his throat. “So, Beijing is sending an expert who works out of a laboratory in Shanghai: Goldman has to reveal his hand, and fast. He is insisting on airtight security. The two of you will entertain him—Sonchai, I want you to take your wife to make it look like a social event. I already cleared her with Goldman. The expert is one Professor Chu.” The Colonel allowed himself a flicker of a smile. “He has visited Bangkok before. He will show you what an evening out in Krung Thep means to him. Let him control the moment. Sooner or later, when Goldman is ready, the Professor will receive a phone call. Just follow his lead.”

  Now he stood up and went to the window. Somehow he had retrieved control. “That’s all,” he said and remained with his back to us while we filed out.

  —

  Back at my post I check out the reports of Ruamsantiah’s men who took statements from the market vendors and others who were in the square at the time of the murder of Nong X. Our constables tend not to be of the most motivated kind, but here, perhaps out of pity for the victim, they have done their best. Instead of the usual, Witness stated he/she was not too clear about the event, could not remember anything relevant, type of report, I have more than twenty lengthy statements, which go into detail about the witnesses’ private lives, domestic disputes, religious convictions, feelings of sadness for the victim, rage fantasies of what they would do to the perp if it were up to them, conviction that some kind of negative occult force is at work in our country at this time: all useless, in other words. My phone rings.

  It is young Detective Tassadorn, still working on the Klong Toey bombing. His tone turns a little strange when he says, “Detective, we found another cell phone at the bomb site. It was buried under a pile of debris, mostly lumber and trash.”

  This does not strike me as strange. Everyone has cell phones, even farang down-and-outs. “What condition is it in?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. It was a cheap local make and looked totally destroyed, but the forensic people took it and managed to transfer all the data to a hard disk.”

  I am beginning to feel insecure here. Why doesn’t the young detective come to the point? “Yes?”

  “Yes. Most of the contacts and recent calls are to known cannabis users, small-time dealers, and birdshit farang, mostly British and American.” I wait. I have heard enough of his tone now to realize he is excited and disturbed. “There were photos, too.”

  My heart gives a little leap of foreboding. “Photos?”

  “Yes.” He lets the moment hang. Perhaps he is not as new and naïve as I thought.

  “And?”

  “Three are of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “Yes. We’re pretty certain they were taken on Soi Cowboy.”

  I stare at the phone. Ever feel your insides quake for no good reason, R? I cannot understand where I put my cool, all of a sudden. I have to let a few beats pass, then say, “I see.”

  “Yes. I thought you ought to know right away.”

  That is an incomplete sentence. The unstated part would be something like, Before I tell everyone else.

  “Thank you, Detective. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it very much.” He is so much younger than me, it is not difficult to sound as if I have it all under control.

  “What are you going to do?” he asks.

  “Leave it with me,” I hear myself say in a confident tone. “I’ll get back to you.”

  When I close the phone I’m shuddering. I have to stand up and take a walk before the cop at the next post sees what kind of state I am in. Outside on the street, I stride toward Sukhumvit at quite a clip until I’m out of range of the station’s psychic orbit. One anxiety a cop in Krung Thep doesn’t normally have is fear of perps. Our rules are quite strict: no matter how unpopular you might be with your colleagues, no gangster is ever going to target you, because the boys would close ranks and take him out. It’s not quite as rigid a law as gravity, but close. Now I don’t feel so protected. How much evidence does a person need before they’re entitled to own their paranoia? The bloody mirror with my name on it could have been an aberration by a psycho. An iPhone with a hundred photos of me on it is not so easily explained, but not necessarily sinister in itself (Chanya tried to cheer me up by suggesting it’s because I’m so good-looking: probably some katoey with a crush on me took the pix). It’s always the third clue that clinches it, both in madness and in law enforcement: another phone at the scene of the bombing with pictures of me in the photo gallery? And taken on Soi Cowboy, just like all the photos on the iPhone?

  Naturally, I need a smoke, and, to be honest here, R, I am on the point of going home and leaving the planet on Air Cannabis for a while, when that curious blip called duty drives me in another direction. Obviously, I need to pay a second visit to Sergeant Lotus Bud at KTC. There is a detour I need to make first, though.

  11

  The best place to buy carved wooden religious objects was on Petchburi Road. In a shop surrounded by Buddhas, bodhisattvas, monks, angels, fairies, gnomes, and demons, I scratched my head. Personally, I was partial to the old Burmese carved monks, for the workmanship (you buy them in pairs: skinny with walking sticks, bent, devout, cheerful, at peace). In the old days the carver meditated until he saw the subject in the crude wood before he started chiseling. I found a couple of teak monks that would fit beside me on the seat of a cab and haggled over the price until I lost patience and paid up. I carried the monks to the cab, where I carefully set them down in the backseat, according them all dignity.

  When I arrived at the police post in Klong Toey, I saw that a supper of rice whiskey and noodles had liberated the sweetness within the middle-aged cop. What a lifetime of self-denial and contemplation had done for the monks, a quarter bottle of Mekong had done for him. With alcohol, though, it’s all about timing. If I’d arrived earlier, he might have retained some resistance; later and he would probably be incoherent or belligerent. I’d bought a flask of my own to top him up if necessary.

  I carried the monks out of the cab and set them down on his desk as he watched. At this moment it did not matter, according to the theology, how I treated the sculptures, because they had not yet been consecrated, but I showed respect anyway. The Sergeant stood back to assess them.

  “Burmese? Nineteenth century? Will you look at those heads…The model the sculptor used—must have been a child or a young woman—perfect. What a wonderful image of innocence! Reminds me of the kids here, before they go wrong.”

  He saw no contradiction between innocence and the hundred scams he was up to his ears in; his contemplation had long ago taken him beyond such false distinctions. Nor did it matter that I was bribing him with religious objects: it made him feel all the more devout.

  He had placed his
great chair with cushions outside his cabin and invited me to grab one of the tubular chairs inside. He placed the flask of Mekong I’d brought on a small collapsible table between the chairs. We drank out of plastic cups and talked about Klong Toey, the slum and the famous market of the same name.

  He particularly wanted to talk about the market, how it was the closest to the port and received goods brought from overseas via the Gulf of Thailand, but also, because the port was on the river, goods are brought there from the interior. True, he explained, “It’s not a wholesale market, but most restaurants, especially the thousands of cooked-food stalls, buy a lot of food in detail rather than bulk.” I knew that to be true. Come between three and six in the morning and you’ll see a representative of just about every major restaurant in the city, even the very top end, which send the chefs themselves to find the choice sea bass, snow fish, fresh chicken, rabbit, beef, every variety of chili, lemongrass (gross or in detail), and every other herb, vegetable, meat, fish, or poultry that hit the tables of restaurants and private homes throughout the city every day. Italian chefs in particular valued our basil, which we cultivate in a number of varieties: sweet, holy, and hairy.

  But I didn’t understand why we were talking about basil when he knew very well why I’d come. I was wondering if he was not just too drunk, too old, or too decadent to be of use, when he said, “It was an accident, you know.”

  “What? The bombing? How can a bombing be an accident?”

  “Not the bombing, the casualties. It was the first Thursday in the month.”

  “So?”

  “First Thursday in the month, those Yanks were normally up before dawn—usually about three-thirty a.m.—to visit the market.”

  “They were in the catering business?” He grunted and wasn’t going to speak until I’d at least started to work it out. “There’s a delivery—a special delivery—first Thursday in the month?”

  “Sure. A rice barge brings it from the north. The kingpins are Lao. Everyone in the business knows. I bet your Colonel Vikorn knows. It’s basically cottage-industry stuff, though.”

  I was trying to decrypt the story, which was not difficult, and at the same time trying to fit it in with what little I knew about the three Americans. It seemed they had only been hanging out in Bangkok for ten months. I had no information about where they were before that, but ten months is not long enough to set up a fully protected trafficking operation from scratch all on your own, not if you want to be secure. You would need local input, local operators you trusted. I figure there is only one plausible explanation.

  “They came to you when they first arrived? They were old Southeast Asia hands who were naturalized Cambodians, so they would know the form if not the local language.”

  “They came to me for help. They said they’d had to leave Cambodia, but they didn’t say why they were in Cambodia, or why three Americans their age could not return to the States. But they were sincere, I could see that. I felt compassion for them. Obviously, they needed a trade, some way to make dough. And they learned Thai much quicker than most farang, because they were already fluent in Khmer. After a couple of months they were part of the furniture. Very unusual.”

  I’d been trying to keep my sipping of the Mekong to a minimum, but I was starting to feel a tad tipsy. “You set it up for them?”

  “I never set up anything. I told them a certain wholesaler who brings sacks of jasmine rice down from the north occasionally brings something else in the bags. He is very discreet, a careful man, almost as old as them. I like dealing with old men, they’re safer and they don’t have ridiculous ambitions. It turned out fine. The rice producer would hold a monthly auction among, say, ten trusted dealers, usually dividing the produce up between them. They each have their own patch, so there’s no fighting. The Americans would buy just enough to sell to American tourists they felt they could trust. They would hang out in Khaosan Road, checking out just the right farang who wants to get high in Asia, but is old enough and cool enough to keep quiet. That’s what I knew they would do and it worked out fine.”

  “But how did the wholesaler know to trust them? And I bet they have safe passage with the dope anywhere in Klong Toey. And I bet that cost them at least ten percent. And I bet you charged a setup fee as well.”

  “Win-win,” the Sergeant said, lighting a Krong Thip 90 and sipping some more whiskey. “One of them told me there are farang books about it. Economics, they call it.”

  “So what happened this month? Why weren’t they at the market on the last Thursday?”

  “ ’Cause they didn’t need to be. These are not ambitious empire builders. They did so well in their sales the previous month, they had enough money to last them. There was a group of oldies passing through, relatives of vets missing in action, just come back from Vietnam. Bought up all their stock. They always worked on a sufficiency basis. They were careful never to take too much.”

  I sipped the Mekong and nodded. It was important not to rush him. “You mean, whoever planted the bomb was relying on them being out, at the market, when it went off?”

  “Why else choose that morning on that day of the month? There are no coincidences in Thailand.”

  I scratched my chin. “So the bomb was just to scare them?”

  “Yes, that’s my theory.”

  “But why?”

  He shrugged. “In Bangkok it could be anything. Maybe the bombers thought the Americans had cheated them. Maybe they were just Thais who don’t like farang moving into the business. Or it could be something else. Like I say, those old men have only been here less than a year. They would have a lot of history from another country, wouldn’t they? And what kind of history, when you consider they chose to live in the lowest kind of third-world slum?”

  I let a couple of beats pass. Atmosphere is important for intuition, and that’s the faculty I wanted the Sergeant to exercise right now. “You’re right, dead right. Why did they need Klong Toey? Those old men, the three of them—there must have been something different about them that you noticed. There aren’t any other farang living here, not even birdshit farang like them. And, frankly, I’ve never heard of Americans becoming Cambodian citizens. The traffic tends to be in the other direction.”

  He took a deep toke on his Krong Thip, sipped some more Mekong, and nodded. “That’s right.”

  “So, what about them?”

  “At first they seemed just like old farang men, you know, kind of charming, steady, very likable, been in the East a long time, smart enough to be polite like Thais instead of aggressive like farang.”

  “Then?”

  “Then, when you watched them carefully, you realized they were all crazy. In a very specific way that’s hard to explain and not actually out of control in the way of most crazies. But they were all nuts.”

  “Could you be a little more specific? You call someone crazy, you have to have a reason.”

  “Ask anyone who knew them around here.”

  I lost patience. “But what were the symptoms?”

  “You don’t have to snap. I know what you want to know, but there’s no way to tell you what you want to know, because it’s so hard to explain. If one of them recovers, spend an hour with him and you’ll see what I mean.”

  I grunted, leaned back in the chair, tried to tune in to his long, slow waves. “In what way crazy? Give me an example.”

  “In the middle of a conversation they would break off.”

  “Old men’s minds wander.”

  “This wasn’t wandering. They would break off and think very intensely about something for as long as five minutes, as though they were in a different world, then return to the conversation. They all did it. They were aware of it and tried to cover up. That’s what was crazy.”

  At the moment I had no way of absorbing Lotus Bud’s psychoanalysis of the three old men. I was as drunk as I needed to be to bond with the Sergeant, who was quite drunk himself. I figured it was now or never with my killer question.
/>   “Sergeant,” I said softly, in a tone I’d not used before. Even in his inebriation he noticed the nuance, laid his head back, closed his eyes, then opened the left one to glance at me. “The smart phone you found after the explosion.” He grunted, closed both eyes. “Sergeant, it was in exceptionally good condition for a phone that had been thrown up in the air by a bomb and landed on concrete. It was not only brand-new, it was an Apple 5s—a luxury, almost like jewelry, costs over twenty-five thousand baht new, when anyone can buy a cell phone for just a few thousand. I bet there’s no one in Klong Toey who owns an iPhone—not a legal one, anyway. Everyone around here buys fakes or secondhand or stolen. And that place where you said you found it, that was quite a way from the bomb site. A delicate thing like a phone, especially a sophisticated one like that…Well, it was operating perfectly, wasn’t it? Those photos of me were clear and bright, just as if the phone had not been through an explosion. And it was brand-new.”

  A long pause during which LB took a slug of rice whiskey. “He said I had to let you figure it out for yourself. He didn’t really care if you found out, but I wasn’t to tell you unless you figured it out first. He’s playing some game with you.”

  “You mean someone came to see you? Before or after the explosion?”

  “After. A few hours after.”

  “And gave you that iPhone and told you to call Vikorn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was he?”

  “An American.”

  “Huge, old, a giant?”

  “No. He wasn’t old. He was tall. Slim. Young. Very fit like an athlete or a military man. His hair was very short and so blond it was almost white. A killer.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “How would I not know that? I’ve been a cop in Klong Toey for three decades. How could I survive if I didn’t know men? And women too. Pimps, whores, pickpockets, burglars, car thieves, murderers for passion, murderers for greed: each one has a different signal, a different smell.”