by John Burdett
I’m amazed and stare at her. “How the hell—?”
“Pi Tai told me. You know, she runs the typing pool. I’m not totally without sources.”
“Really?”
“Cops are just amazing gossips—the men more than the women.” She looked me in the eyes. “It’s okay, I know she doesn’t fancy you, she probably couldn’t get wet for a man anyway. Lust, aversion, indifference. When she looks at you her arrow points to indifference. When she looks at me it points to lust. When you look at her your arrow points to fear. You’re scared of her.”
“Why?”
“She’s smarter than you.”
I let that pass. “And you—where is your arrow pointing, these days?”
She holds my hand for a moment, as if to soften a blow. “I’ve been stuck on indifference for too long, Sonchai. I’ve done it for you. You marry a man to tame him, because his virility scares and unsettles you. Allowing yourself to be tamed in turn is only fair, part of the deal. So you end up with two very tame humans. Apparently Mother Nature set it up that way. But I can’t keep it up, darling. I really can’t. And neither can you.” She removes her hand and looks out of the window. “You do know where your arrow points when you look at me?” It’s my turn to look out the window. She pronounces the word softly, tenderly, kindly, deftly: “Boredom.” The moment hangs. “There is something about Inspector Krom that seems to offer a cure, isn’t there?”
“She’s dangerous.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Sometimes the only way out of a conversation is to take it somewhere else. “I don’t think I’ve come across a brain like hers before,” I say. “I’m going to feel sorry for the Professor if he thinks he’s going to sleep with her tonight—or ever.”
“Should I give him the come-on instead? Would it be good for your investigation? I wouldn’t have to fuck him, I could just string him along until you told me to stop. Maybe that’s the only contribution I can make.”
I groan. “For Buddha’s sake, Chanya. Please.”
She laughs again, that free and troubling lama laugh from the other side of the abyss.
We emerge from the lift lobby and look up: Orion and his belt; the Big Dipper; bit of Moon; Pegasus. Whichever poet first called it a black velvet canopy encrusted with diamonds was right: you can’t improve on that, although in the tropics it can also resemble a wet blanket with holes in it. Chanya is charmed. She stares into the heavens, willing a crew of aliens to send a ladder for her to climb up.
—
We were the first to arrive. Stars aside, it was a bar so expensive and successful it could afford to place its tables far apart. Baristas—all men—wore quick-draw holsters where electronic menus and credit card machines nestled. They were intense, focused, professionally polite, and quite ruthless in pursuit of a place in the mixologist’s (do not call them barmen) hall of fame. Trained by aliens and very un-Thai, in other words. We ordered a couple of piña coladas, because that’s what we order in bars like this, checked out the other customers: a group of young upper-middle-class New Yorkers getting louder drink by drink; a blond couple sipping white wine who looked German; a Chinese couple probably from Hong Kong; a British family, obviously wealthy, with a teenage son and daughter. Now a single Chinese man appeared and the maître d’ ushered him to our table. Chanya and I stood up.
First thing I have to report, R: he was tall. No one was expecting tall. Well, you don’t, do you, when you’re told you will meet a Chinese professor who works out of offices in Shanghai? Let us be honest here about our species-wide addiction to stereotypes: short, plump, mid-fifties with male pattern baldness was the first image that came to mind, not a five-eleven northerner in his early forties, lean with strong harmonious features like a film star and a full head of jet-black hair coiffed by an expert. This only created another layer of complexity. Suddenly Krom might not be the victim of cynical male humor; she might be the evening’s big winner. Except that she was a dyke, of course.
“Detective Jitpleecheep? I’m Chu.” He turned chivalrously to Chanya, to whom he offered a Hollywood smile, circa 1950. This was going to be an interesting evening. Chanya mastered herself to return a finely honed smile designed to acknowledge his beauty and importance without in any way compromising her status as a chaste married woman. Of course, it was just a posture and we were not legally married and her pupils were opened a little wider than was entirely appropriate considering she had known the newcomer for less than a minute, but face is everything in the East. When we sat and he looked expectantly at the empty chair, Chanya, now on her best behavior, told him that “Ms. Krom will be here any minute.”
Now our vulgar piña coladas with the great hairy lumps of pineapple sticking out of extravagant glasses with cocktail sticks sporting white paper hats seemed bannock, or country bumpkin, especially when he ordered a coupe of Dom Perignon—vintage, naturally.
Then it was nothing but small talk until the other star arrived. The Professor had studied trivia, probably as a survival skill essential in cultures without depth or mahjong, and was horribly good at it. He tried us out with politics, philosophy, and economics, then slipped naturally into Chanya’s preference for women’s issues: is the West actually behind China?
Chu was too sophisticated to give a standard-issue critique of the hypocrisy and double-talk of the Western model that had never done better than half deliver on any of its promises to anyone, ever, especially its own people—although he hinted as much. He dealt instead with the conflict in China between the modernizers, who are the survivors and inheritors of Mao’s revolution, and the closet imperialists who secretly assume that China will return to its former splendor, decadence, and inequality; indeed has already done so in Shanghai and Beijing and all along the east coast. Did we know there already existed a breed of wealthy merchants who have stopped cutting their fingernails to prove they never do manual work, just like under the Empress Dowager? Chu balanced the various arguments skillfully, taking care not to omit anything relevant even if prejudicial to his case, then concluded that, yes, China is streets ahead of the West in terms of women’s issues—and most of the other issues, too, although he conceded a certain attitude problem when it came to pollution. Now Krom arrived.
Who ever would have guessed? She came as Charlie Chaplin. Well, that was my first thought, because of the hat. It was not a bowler—not quite—but that kind of shape, pushed rakishly back. I had to admit it went well with the pearl satin shirt and trademark bootlace tie, the black pantaloons and the laddish lace-up black boots, but it was the hat that said, Careful, I’m different. I was proud of her. Chanya, though, felt upstaged. The exclusive eye contact she had enjoyed with the handsome professor had now to be shared with this startling and fascinating newcomer. She tried, but could not compete with the hat. Our eyes met. She looked away.
To make matters worse, Krom, who I’d considered incapable of small talk, immediately opened up the conversation by referring to the Jade Rabbit. BTW, R, Jade Rabbit was the Chinese Moon buggy who kept a diary on the PRC’s social media sites. The poor thing ran out of energy while stranded on the Dark Side and left his two billion fans in Greater China with a touching farewell message:
If this journey must come to an early end, I am not afraid. Whether or not the repairs are successful, I believe even my malfunctions will provide my masters with valuable information and experience.
That did sound a tad like the heroic self-sacrifice of early communist mythology, and I was waiting to see how the very urbane Chu would respond.
“Believe me,” he said to Krom with a smile, “I despise Chinese infantilism as much as you probably do. But Jade Rabbit has been a great success with the masses—like Mickey Mouse in the West. Except that JR is doing a real job. That must constitute progress, no? Imagine a world where Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, Mickey and Minnie actually do something useful instead of mindlessly beating each other up?”
“That’s so true,” Chanya said.
<
br /> “So much depends on how technology hits the private citizen,” the Professor explained. “Computing power among the masses is already extraordinary—there was a degree of paranoia about that in the Party, but it turns out the little people prefer to share porn, gossip, and insults and listen to junk music. It’s a fantastic way of shutting them up, like a voluntary electronic gulag. No danger at all except from organized Islamists.”
Chanya had now decided she didn’t like the Professor after all, and took this last statement as clear indication of his male chauvinist totalitarian soul, which, she had already intuited, was not attracted to her anyway. Krom, though, looked at it differently. She agreed that the amount of computing power out there among the people as a whole was amazing—like a source of uranium nobody has yet seen how to harness. Suppose, for example, a village of a couple thousand people all linked up their computers in pursuit of a common cause? Of course, when that does happen, the world will cease to be recognizable.
It was conversation as cover, in other words. Krom had the attention of the alpha male that Chanya had lost, despite the fact that Krom didn’t want it. For my part I did not banish from my mind the possibility that the irresistible Professor might be hors de combat by reason of being gay. He didn’t give a single clue about which way he swung until, at the end of the meal when the ladies went off to the bathroom together, he changed seats and shifted closer to me than is normal at this kind of supper and began to whisper sweet nothings in my ear.
The sweet nothings, though, were yet another cover in this hall of mirrors. In between seductive smiles along with a hand placed on my shoulder, he managed to convey a quite different message. I confess I had not noticed the arrival of two Chinese men during the course of the meal who had installed themselves at the far end of the restaurant on seats facing us.
“They’re from the ministry,” he whispered. “I wonder if you would help me lose them?”
I used my best quick flick to take them in. My mind went back to that morning on the river. “Are they photographers?” I asked.
“They’ve been using miniature video cameras all night. They’re the latest, better than anything the West has. Quite invisible unless you know what to look for.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Pat Pong—but I don’t dare with them on my tail.”
“No problem,” I said and took out my cell phone to call Sergeant Ruamsantiah.
“No problem,” the Sergeant said. “I’ll call Colonel Wanakan. He’ll have a couple of his boys check their passports when they leave the restaurant. Where are you?”
“Heaven’s Gate Tower.”
“I went there once. Hated it.”
“The food?”
“No. The height. It gave me vertigo.”
—
But on the way to Pat Pong the Professor received a phone call that altered all our plans. I watched the change in his expression as someone spoke on the other end of the line: playtime postponed, this was a work moment; adulthood returned with a thump. “Tell the driver to go to this address,” he said to Krom in the back of the cab, using a stern tone we’d not heard before. “We’re going to a demo,” he told us.
13
The address was a condominium in an upscale building on Soi 24, probably the most expensive street in the city outside of the business district at Satorn. According to the property pages of the Bangkok Post, units here sell for just under two million dollars. It sounds a lot until you compare similar properties in other capitals. In Bangkok that kind of money buys four thousand square feet of habitable area including maid’s quarters with a plunge pool on the terrace, guards at the gate who cut sharp salutes and click their heels Prussian style, and a house god who lives in a small palace atop a stone column and looks in four directions at once. To judge from the offerings as we passed him on the driveway he was partial to oranges, bananas, and Pepsi-Cola.
I was not entirely surprised to see the two Chinese cameramen from the ministry in the lobby, waiting for us. They had brought a modest movie camera with tripod that they carried into the lift. A woman from reception took us all to the top where the entire floor led to a magnificent entrance with alcove. Just inside the alcove, on either side of the double front door, two burly white men who had to be ex-marines, or serving marines co-opted for the night, stood at ease. They raised machine pistols and politely asked us to wait before coming any closer, then spoke into their shoulder mikes. Goldman appeared at the door with a Chinese woman in a business pants suit who told him that Chu was one of them, that Krom and I had to be let in because we were from Vikorn and the cameramen had to be let in because they were with the “other” ministry. “That camera stays outside with the guards,” Goldman said, then turned to us with a smile.
“Good evening. Please come in.” The tone said, Quickly, fast now, but it was to be a gracious soiree: the giant wore a silk paisley smoking jacket, puffed on a cigar, stood by the door like a good host while we trooped in. Then he said to the guards, “That’s it, you see any apes coming out of those lifts, you shoot.” The ex-marines grunted.
I wasn’t expecting rows of seats as in a small movie theater, all pointing toward a back wall with a white screen. It was a long room that lay between us and the blue plunge pool on the other side of glass sliding doors. You couldn’t miss the state-of-the-art sound system or the large photograph of Goldman in a dinner jacket high on a wall. A polished pine staircase led to bedrooms upstairs. Krom took in the sound system while I scanned the framed photographs that took up the length of one wall. I paused at one of the Asset with a racing bicycle and a famous American cyclist who had won the Tour de France. Both he and the Asset wore identical high-tech shirts featuring the Stars and Stripes and looked so happy they might have been in love. Most of the other photos showcased the Asset’s sports achievements: swimming, fencing, karate, and especially cycling. At the far end of the room a blackwood Chinese temple table held cups and trophies; I guessed he came top of the league in all those challenging sports.
The chairs were filled mostly with Chinese, men in gray business suits, with a couple of Chinese women also dressed in monochrome. Sakagorn, in a tuxedo, sat next to one of the HiSo Chinese women who might have been the head of the delegation. Everyone was looking serious but relaxed, polite but not convinced. Buyers in a buyer’s market was the impression I took away on my first glance. And now Goldman looked nervous.
“Okay,” he said, “we can start. Just a couple of words first. What you are going to see I have not stolen.” A pause to let his joke sink in. It didn’t. The word stolen did not invoke any response at all, one way or the other. “I would love to have stolen it for keeps, but then all hell would have broken loose. So I borrowed it. That’s the reason for the rush. Within a couple of hours from now this tape has to be back where it was borrowed from. They deliberately made it nondigital to make it harder to copy. This is strictly a tape of a dress rehearsal that didn’t go perfectly. So why am I showing it? Let’s be frank. I have the most fantastic product in the world, but it is not perfect. Buy now, in its imperfect state, you have the opportunity to modify and improve. You buy him, you get me, too, and I will train anyone you like. I will train others to train trainers. In five years you have a viable unit. In ten you have the beginnings of an army. With me you get the complete program and the opportunity to make it all your own. Wait another couple of years, though—” He held up his hands. “It isn’t a question of money, I know you can afford it. But what would you prefer to be, the second country to get the Bomb, or the fourth, or the tenth? Why not the first? Anyway, I present myself to you tonight as an honest broker. This is what I have, warts and all. And I know there is one thing above all you’ll all be looking for, because you are all professionals in the field. The key, I don’t need to tell you, to this particular kind of product, is the accelerated learning enhancement: ALE. And this is what the echolocation exercise here is really testing. I invite you to take out your timepieces to
do a check. I am confident the learning curve will astonish you. Okay.”
At his signal the lights dimmed and a projector began to whirr. And there he was, the Asset himself, perhaps a year or so younger, on the screen, beaming, a tall young blond in mouse-gray open-neck linen shirt, navy pants, and running shoes. He was standing on a stage empty except for a single chair and holding a microphone and cross-referring to people invisible to us. His English was strangely mid-Atlantic, as if he spent a lot of time with a British grandfather. This was a key moment for me, R—a first flash of full enlightenment. The memory is vivid and present as I write.
“Okay,” the Asset says. “I just walk on like this—and what? I make it up? I’ve never done this before, this wasn’t part of the program. What do I do in this type of real-life nonmilitary situation?” His voice is light, buoyant, silky, freshly washed. Kind of preppy, I guess you could say.
A pause. Then a quiet, scholarly kind of American voice says, “You ad-lib. And you learn.”
“What shall I say?”
“At this stage you are telling them who you are.”
“Who I am?” For some reason that raises a laugh somewhere in his audience, which causes him to grin. “Yeah, right. Hey, hello humanity, I am your worst nightmare—how about that?”
“C’mon,” the voice says, “this is sales practice we’re doing here. You’re selling yourself as a product. You knew you’d have to in the end.”
“Oh. Okay. These are ordinary people I’m going to be speaking to in this scenario? I mean, people who don’t know? But they must know something, or there’d be no reason for them to be here—or should I say there?”
A sigh. “Just do your basic public image performance and follow the exercise. It’s gonna be echolocation.”
