The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

“How was his signal?”

  “Flat. Only killers for fun have that signal. What do you call them?”

  “Psychopaths.”

  “Right.”

  A pause while I absorbed this wisdom. “That’s all—he came, gave you the phone, and told you to call me but not to mention him?”

  “Yes. He said you would be very interested. It was very private, very personal. Between you and him. He said you and he would be meeting soon. He said you and he are going to be very close.” Lotus Bud turned his head. “I thought about that. You’re working on that murder of a young woman who lived in the market square behind the police station in District 8, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you thought about where that is exactly? I checked on a map after he left.”

  “Of course I know where it is.”

  “I mean geographically.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s the exact geographic center of District 8. If D8 is a chessboard, that murder happened on the center squares. Your district, with your name on the mirror. What could be clearer than that?”

  We stared at each other. Now my cell phone started to ring. I fished it out impatiently, afraid that the Sergeant would change his mind about confiding his thoughts to me. It was the young Detective Tassatorn again.

  “Khun Sonchai? I have news. Do you want the good or the bad first?”

  He was a little breathless, and at first I supposed it must be because he’d cracked the case and, like a good Buddhist, was trying not to sound too proud of himself.

  “The good first.”

  “I’ve found them.”

  “Who?”

  “The two young thugs who set that bomb.”

  I let a couple of beats pass. “Really?”

  “They were seen. Two separate witnesses saw them running from the explosion and recognized them. They’re low-grade crooks, lowlifes who do small crime to get by, not real pros.”

  “They have form?”

  “Tons of it. One has a sideline in bomb-making. Not big terrorist stuff, you know, just local intimidation work. He specializes in settling scores. I don’t need to tell you how the mafia likes to use explosives. They scare more and can be hard to trace. He was also involved in that car-parts scam, you know, Red Kim’s gang were bringing in spare parts and assembling high-end foreign cars from them to dodge the tax.”

  “So what, you found prints?”

  “Not prints. The bomb experts were able to find traces of liquid petroleum gas. I organized a raid and there were traces on their clothes.”

  I glanced at the Sergeant, who was developing deep religious feelings for the two carved monks I’d brought him and listening to the conversation at the same time.

  “That’s pretty good news. Wow! You really work fast. You did all that in less than forty-eight hours.” I heard the purring of an ambitious young man on the other phone. “So where is the bad news in all that?”

  “They retained Lord Sakagorn.”

  “Sakagorn?”

  The Sergeant perked up for a moment, then returned to his reverie.

  “Yes.”

  I let a couple of beats pass. “I see. So did you get a confession, any kind of statement?”

  “No. Sakagorn found holes in the way I obtained the warrant. It’s true, I cut a few corners—how was I to know they’d instruct him? He thinks up legal points even the judges have never heard of. He sent one of his assistants to the station to argue, orally and in writing, that there is no power in any of the police statutes and decrees that enables us to hold those suspects. All our evidence was obtained illegally, according to Sakagorn. What do I know? Everybody skipped those courses at the academy. The instructors didn’t know the law either.”

  I scratched my jaw, remembering my own year as a cadet. Law was not big on the syllabus. “I see.”

  “Detective,” the young detective said in a low tone, “should I be scared?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Please advise me.”

  “Let’s look at it both ways. Say you decide to take on Lord Sakagorn and prosecute. You will be bombarded with offers of wealth and rapid advancement if you play ball, and threats of dire consequences if you don’t. In the unlikely event that you win against him in court and get a conviction, he won’t rest until he has used his influence to destroy your career. He’ll find a way to discredit you and win on appeal. If, on the other hand, you play ball with Sakagorn, then kiss your freedom and integrity goodbye, he will own you for life.”

  On the other end of the phone I heard the sharp gasp of a young man who had just entered the last initiation, the one where you finally admit there is no way out. My mood altered when he started to cry.

  “I knew it would be like this. They warned me, but I believed in my karma and the teachings of the Buddha. They said that I was like a white sheet that would be dipped in black dye every day. From white I would go to dirty white, to gray—in the end, I would be pure black. But I didn’t want to believe them. How have you managed, Khun Sonchai, all these years? You are famous for not taking money.”

  “Even preserving one’s soul requires a certain amount of wriggling, Khun Tassatorn. Innocence can’t save you all on its own, it needs help from experience.”

  “Yes. I can see that. Do you want the bombing case? Are you saying this to enhance your career?”

  “I don’t want it at all. My career cannot be enhanced. I have a reputation, like you say, for not taking money, career advancement is blocked for me. You still have a chance, you’re young and ambitious, it’s just bad luck you got landed with this. You are more than welcome to keep the case, if you like.”

  “I’m not crying for my career, Khun Sonchai, I’m crying for Thailand.”

  “I know, Khun Tassatorn. What would you like me to do?”

  “Take the case, Khun Sonchai. My chief will find a way of transferring it to District 8 if Colonel Vikorn wants it. Colonel Vikorn gets what Colonel Vikorn wants, everyone knows that. Now we’ve talked I know you are so much stronger than I. Perhaps only you could take on a case like this and survive. But please answer one question: why are you so interested in this particular matter? To tell you the truth, I never would have worked so hard if you had not inspired me with your overwhelming passion, rushing off to the hospital like that to visit those old men. I’ve never seen anything like it. When I asked people if Khun Sonchai Jitpleecheep was like this on all his cases, they told me no, normally you were not the kind of cop who always gets his man. Normally you were very reasonable and laid-back, they told me.”

  I was not sure how to answer. Why did I rush off to see those three unconscious men? It was the photos on the cell phone of course. Someone takes a hundred pictures of you, the hungry heart assumes it must be love. Curious how the spirit moves.

  “I’m not especially interested in the case, Detective. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other, plodding along. I’ve always found that to be the safest.”

  “Is that what you advise?”

  The trouble with innocence: it tries to recruit someone who has lost it to help retain it. “I don’t advise anything at all, Khun Tassatorn. War is always a balance between wanting to win and needing to survive.”

  A long pause. “War. Yes, that’s the one thing they don’t tell you in the academy. From the first day on the beat, you’re at war. And you start thinking like someone in the middle of a battle that never ends.” His voice turned bitter. “You start to think like a cornered rat.”

  I let the moment pass.

  “It’s not only police work that’s like that,” I said. “My wife is an unemployed academic and she feels pretty much the same way.”

  He grunted. I gave him time to recover. Now he changed tack.

  “Yes, please take the case. You are braver and tougher than I’ll ever be.”

  “There’s no need to talk like that, Khun Tassatorn. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning. I was in the same position a
s you once.”

  “No,” he said with some finality. “In the morning I will not feel better. In the morning I will resign and ordain as a monk. It was the vocation I should have chosen in the first place. I was not made for this world. I’m not built of steel like you. What do you say to that?”

  “If you really do it, I shall envy you.”

  “Then I will do it,” he said, and closed the phone. I put my own back in my pocket.

  “You didn’t talk about those photos of you on the cell phones,” Sergeant Lotus Bud said out of the corner of his mouth.

  Throughout my conversation with Tassatorn, the Sergeant’s head had sagged farther and farther to one side until it was resting on his shoulder and he had appeared to be asleep. I shook my head. My street smarts simply did not compare with his.

  “He didn’t mention it.”

  “Scared,” LB said. “Those pix I found are the real reason he’s giving you the case.”

  “Those pictures of me on that iPhone? So how do you explain them?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Lotus Bud said. “But that young blond guy knew all about those old guys, who had been dealing dope for a year. In that time you learn a lot about the business.” He raised a droopy eyebrow to look at me. “You learn what a lot of us have heard over the grapevine.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like stories about a certain respected detective with a weakness for weed who helps to run his mother’s bar on Soi Cowboy. You would have been the answer to their prayers if they could have first taken you on as a client, then maybe persuaded you to help with sales contacts. That way they would have had cast-iron protection—that’s the way they would have seen it. It’s the way Asia works, and they knew that. Don’t tell me that didn’t cross your mind?”

  I sighed and took out a five-hundred-baht note to slip under the can of Nescafé on the shrine to the household gods.

  “Of course it crossed my mind,” I lied.

  The Sergeant used his cell phone to call a cab. I heard him tell the driver to put the ride on the Sergeant’s own bill. He was quite emotional when we said goodbye, I assumed because we’d bonded while drunk. Or perhaps he thought I didn’t have much time left in this body. Just before the cab drew away he said, “Of course, that wouldn’t explain a hundred photos. It would explain the connection but not the photos.”

  “That’s right.”

  He grunted. “And it wouldn’t explain why the phone came to me via that young farang killer.” He scratched his beard. “Not every mystery has a solution—which is okay, solutions can be dangerous.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s one other thing, though. I’m surprised you didn’t ask about it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I don’t speak English worth a damn and that young American only had basic Thai.”

  Now I knew I was losing my skill set. Why didn’t I think of that? “So how did you communicate?”

  “Khmer. Same as I used with the old Americans, before they mastered Thai. I was brought up in Surin. Khmer was the local dialect.”

  “He was fluent?”

  “Spoke it like a native. Better than me. The Surin dialect is pretty basic, but he spoke the real thing without accent.”

  —

  In the back of the cab on the way home, with no fellow human to distract me, the mind returns to primal chaos. I am like a tower of billiard balls that miraculously remained vertical for a moment and now collapses as I knew I would. Why me? is the question everyone asks at this point in a breakdown. I go over the three curses for the thousandth time: Nong X, murdered, my name on the mirror; an iPhone with one name in the Contacts application and a hundred photos of me; another cell phone with three more photos of me. None of this should have destroyed my sense of self were there not the haunting possibility that one of those Americans in the hospital, all of whom are naturalized Cambodians, may be my father and the looming conviction that we are all implicated in something bigger than a murder and a son in search of a dad.

  When I arrive at the hovel Chanya is awake and working at her desk. I enter and press my back against the door before succumbing to the tremble-and-blurt phase of mental disintegration. At first she wants to carry on working; then she decides that as my lifelong companion she may have a part to play in my despair; then, as I blurt with ever greater rapidity, trying to pierce her shell, she gets up, takes my hand, and has me sit in her chair while she squats in front of me.

  “But these are two totally unrelated issues, work and personal issues, all mixed up,” she explains in a tone that scrupulously avoids sentimentality. “You need to distinguish them.”

  “How?”

  “Well, work is real, and all this lost-father stuff is just something that’s been hanging there rotting in the back of your mind forever.”

  I stare wild-eyed at her, failing to comprehend her total lack of comprehension. Then she remembers she once did a course on what might be termed first-response therapy: Cries for Help and How to React to Them. She suddenly assumes a care-and-concern expression (wide and worried eyes, furrowed brow, social-worker buzzwords, physical contact to provide the illusion of warmth, nauseating patience). When she starts to wipe my brow, hold my hand, and gaze earnestly into my eyes, it pisses me off so much I pull out of it and push her away. Am I alone in preferring madness to therapy? She now stands up in a flash of anger.

  “So, have you spoken to your mother about any of this?” she snaps.

  “Any of what? Decapitation? Transhumanism? Geopolitics?”

  “That’s all professional stuff, that isn’t what’s bothering you. It’s the illusory connection between you and those three Americans: you have transferred your personal id onto what should be superego preoccupied with work and contribution to society—I’m using old vocabulary here, but the ideas are basically the same today as in the time of Freud.”

  “Huh?”

  “Of course none of those old farang are your father. That’s a classic transference from fantasy to reality. The reason there were photos of you on that old cell phone was just as Lotus Bud said: they heard you were a smoker and a cop and wanted you as a client.”

  “So what about the hundred pictures on the iPhone? What about my name on the mirror in blood?”

  She waves a hand. “Stuff like that can always be explained, once the whole picture is clear.” I see from her face that it is quite a while since she did the course. She is not totally sure she is following the right tack. “Clearly, the father thing is at the root of all this. I’m going to speak to your mother tomorrow. Perhaps some kind of intervention is what you need.”

  That seems to have exhausted the twenty-first century’s reservoir of compassion. I’m happier when she reverts to a more primitive technique. She gives me a big smacker on the lips, jiggles my dick in a friendly way, grins right into my face, and says, “What about that oil Krom gave you? How are you supposed to smoke it?”

  I sag with relief: whatever the issues between us, we are both big fans of self-medication. Now Chanya is intrigued by the idea of dipping a couple of cigarettes in the oil, then baking the cigarettes at hundred degrees centigrade for fifteen minutes until the solvent has burned off, leaving, in theory, pure THC stuck to the tobacco fibers. Neither of us have smoked this way before and we have no idea what to expect. We bake two Marlboros, one each, lie on the mattress with a makeshift ashtray on either side, smile at each other, and light up.

  So far as I can recall I was a third of the way through my own little ciggy when I found important information to share with Chanya. This stuff is really strong, is what I wanted to say, but the words came out so garbled that even I could not understand them. It didn’t matter, for Chanya was lying dead straight, arms rigidly by her side, her eyes firmly fixed on the Invisible. Eventually she roused herself enough to say, “Krom’s oil is very strong,” and returned to heaven. For myself, while I felt in full control of my mind, my facial and tongue muscles were a different m
atter. The couple of syllables I attempted seemed garbled; I could not understand what I was trying to say. And so we lay on our backs, the two of us, for quite a few hours, our bodies touching, our souls a cosmos apart. From time to time during the course of the night I returned to earth to take a glance at Chanya, who remained rigid, bug-eyed, and enthralled by my side.

  12

  Krom sent separate SMSs to Chanya and me to remind us that we were invited to supper tonight. In the cab on the way to Heaven’s Gate Tower, generally known as the HGT, Chanya suffers from an attack of nerves. Despite her former success as a hostess and escort, it has been a while since she worked.

  “It’s going to be awkward, isn’t it?”

  “How so?”

  “You must have thought about it. This invitation comes from on high, through Vikorn’s PRC connections. Vikorn has let this Professor Chu think he’s going to lay a dazzlingly attractive inspector who is also a high-tech whiz kid—a woman totally up his alley—all on the Colonel’s tab. It’s one of those male transactions in which women are the currency, don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

  “Women aren’t the currency, lust is. It’s like the Buddha said, it’s lust, fear, or indifference with humankind.”

  “That’s right,” she says with a grin. I still admire the way she can flip her moods in a second. She has flown across an internal abyss like a lama, now she’s on the other side, laughing. “On that retreat I went on two years ago, we turned it into an exercise. We used the imagery of a clock face with an arrow and three positions: attraction, aversion, indifference. In our meditations we had to observe which one the arrow was pointing at, from second to second. Then from split second to split second. The arrow moves automatically according to the thoughts in your head, there’s no control. In the end the whole universe amounts to that: lust, fear, boredom. Unless you’re enlightened.”

  She looks me in the eye. “I called her. I forgot to tell you?”

  “Krom? Today?”

  “Yes. After you went to work. There have been rumors. There were a bunch of cops from your police station at the khao kha moo stall when you were having that intense little chat together that lasted quite a while. I called to tell her about the gossip. She apologized and said there was nothing between you. I said I knew that. It was one of those totally civilized girls-being-tidy things.”