The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  I try to think how to play it. What do I have that a man like that could possibly relate to? “Desolation,” I say.

  —

  The address is less than ten minutes’ walk from Silver’s, a midrange apartment building with underground parking and a three-man security detail in the lobby. When I explain I’m here to see Khun Da-Sil-Va (you need to pronounce it in a singsong if you want to be understood, with the Da high, the Sil low, and the Va high), the mood music changes. The security makes a call to someone who must be fluent in Thai, then gives me a high wai when they close the phone. With a deference usually reserved in our culture for money and aristocracy, they show me to a private lift that serves the penthouse.

  Penthouses are special worldwide. In Southeast Asia they tend to be almost unbuyable, because the developer reserves them for himself, either to live in or let, or as a safe repository of wealth. I’m holding that thought when the door opens and a Thai man in his early forties opens the door. He doesn’t need to pump iron, this guard, nature and a childhood in Isaan built him like a tank. Once I’m over the threshold, an American voice calls in Thai.

  “He’s here,” the bodyguard says, and shows me into a reception area with upscale furnishings. I’m guessing the apartment is at least ten thousand square feet. The man in the wheelchair is looking out the window at the cityscape of Pat Pong and Sarawong. From another angle it is just possible to glimpse the river. Even from the back I can see how huge his head is, how developed those arms and shoulders. He tells the guard to leave us, and only after the door has shut does he swing his chair around. He is old, of course, well over sixty. I don’t know if he kept his hair color or if he dies it black; everything about him gives the impression of latent power—except he has no legs. He offers a hand; I shake it.

  “So, you found me.”

  “Did you expect me to?”

  He shrugs those enormous shoulders. “It was always a possibility.” He frowns. “But I don’t know where he is, don’t want to know, haven’t wanted to know for four decades.” He makes a grimace. “We had a falling-out.”

  “How’s that?”

  He nods in the direction of where his legs once were. “He couldn’t handle it. You could almost say it was worse for him than me. He filled his heart with rage and a lust for vengeance. Joined Special Forces. They mangled his personality, he went through a total change, hundred and eighty degrees. I had enough to cope with, my own head wasn’t so strong after the grenade, but my mother was a good Catholic who brought me up to avoid feelings of intense hatred. The way I saw it, we invaded someone else’s country and got what was coming to us. I felt unlucky, but not unjustly treated—at least not by Charlie. I told him I couldn’t handle seeing him anymore. Then he volunteered for something else—something even worse.” He pauses to stare into space. He whispers hoarsely, “The first five years after the attack are a blur to me. It was all sex and drugs on the way to oblivion.”

  “What happened to change you?”

  He smiles. “My mother came to see me. She figured I wouldn’t be able to stand her heartache. She was right. She was also no longer young. I promised to go on living for as long as she did—but I wasn’t going back to the States.” He raises his great arms then lets them down. “No way she really understood what that meant in the seventies, coming from a vet who had settled in Bangkok.”

  “What did it mean?”

  He scowls. “That woman managing the bar told me you’re a cop. Do you have to ask?”

  I let the question hang for a moment. “You had no start-up money to open a bar?”

  “Now you’re getting close.”

  “You’re not known to law enforcement in Thailand—I checked.”

  He nods. “So, I don’t need to spell it out for you, do I?”

  “Some non-Thai agency heard about you. CIA or FBI? One or the other. They came to see you.” I wave a hand at the enormous room. “Owning a modest bar doesn’t buy this kind of accommodation. But they must have had more than suspicions.”

  “They had a scandal is what they had. Sending young American men to get themselves killed and mutilated in a lost cause was bad enough. To compound that with stuffing the bodies of heroes with smack before flying the bags home—that had to be dealt with, and seen to be dealt with. But I was lucky, they had nothing at all on me. On the other hand, it would have been easy—very, very easy—to fit me up.” He scratches an ear. “I don’t know how the name of your father came up. They kind of inserted it into the conversation, it seemed for no reason. Then I realized they wanted something from me.”

  “What?”

  “Silence. It was the late seventies, the great scandal of Frank Olson was still in everyone’s mind. The war was long lost. They knew I knew your father had volunteered for that program. Far more important to the agency than violations of the bodies of heroes was the containing of MKUltra.”

  “Go on.”

  “Naturally, I promised on my honor not to participate in or in any way become involved with that particularly despicable form of private enterprise that so desecrated the bodies of the fallen. And I promised never to talk about your father and MKUltra.”

  “In return, it seems they left you alone?”

  “Yes. I would have preferred they hadn’t gone and lost me my legs in the first place.” He makes a gesture to include the whole penthouse. “This is just a consolation prize. There were quite a few vets who took the same route. At one time half the bars on Pat Pong were part-owned by vets. Some of them are still around.”

  “You said they ‘inserted’ the name of my father into the conversation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was that name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Jack what?”

  He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right? Or are you deaf?”

  “He’s my father, I have a right to know.”

  “And I have a right to go on living in crippled luxury. If and when you report this conversation, there’s only one conclusion that matters: I refused to tell you the name of your father. End of story.” He stares at me. “Maybe you are desperate, but how am I supposed to test that? You could be working for them, trying to set me up.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  He shrugs. “If I knew why the CIA do things I would have detailed knowledge of why the world is so fucked, wouldn’t I?”

  “But why would my father’s name be an issue? When you knew him you were both FNGs, hanging out together, doing R&R in Bangkok. You must have known his family name? You must have heard it every day at roll call.”

  He swings his chair around to stare at the distant river. Now he has his back to me and seems to be talking as much to himself as to me.

  “He called you Sonchai. Is that still your name?”

  “Yes.”

  He gives a dry chuckle. “It took me five years of learning Thai before I realized he’d screwed up. The standard name is Somchai—with an m. Sonchai means to think or dream. It kind of symbolized everything, that little mistake of his. Like no matter how hard we tried, we were bound to screw up out of sheer ignorance.” He swings the chair around again to face me. “I cannot tell you his family name because they disappeared him, airbrushed him out—with his consent.”

  He is not without compassion. He has to take a deep breath before he is able to say, “He doesn’t exist, Sonchai, except as a ghost, a memory. That was the deal he made when he volunteered, and they expect it to stay that way.”

  I stand still, frozen. He turns away from my gaze. “Think it through, Detective. You leave this building knowing the family name of someone who was volunteered for Ultra. Now you or someone working for you starts to make inquiries over the Net, using that name. Within hours I receive a visit. Maybe this time they’ll come with local law enforcement and a file full of evidence, real or false, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Linking you with the smuggling of heroin in the body bags?”

  He stares at
me until I break eye contact. “You’re smart, but maybe a little naïve, and that leads you to miss the point.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re living in a giant Ponzi scheme. The Fed buys Treasury bonds without spending money because it doesn’t have any. Currency is created on a computer—it’s totally notional. There is nothing at all to back it up. The system was never designed that way, we’re in a virtual universe.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

  “The black hole is massive and it’s eating the world. Even ordinary Americans have started to feel it. Government has come to mean papering over the abyss with fairy tales. Politicians know those fairy tales are the only things people are still willing to vote for. But it’s very fragile. Anything can pop the balloon at any moment. There’s no morality in government service, except the duty to keep covering up. No one wants to be the whistle-blower who destroyed the world. Even sleeping scandals from long ago have the power to bring down the seawall. So what do you think the intelligence services of the planet are really planning for? Not sabotage by a foreign power, but massive civil unrest. A super police force manned by supermen and superwomen is the only way to go.” He stares at me as if sorely tempted to say more. Then he shuts up and turns away. I think, Black hole, that phrase again.

  I give it one last shot. “He must have come to see you after he was in the Ultra program. At least once, or you wouldn’t know all this.”

  He looks me in the eye. “He wasn’t the same man, Sonchai, he really wasn’t the same man.”

  31

  Next day I’m at the cooked-food stall opposite the station, my gun jammed down the back of my pants, eating khao kha moo and continuing to absorb my meeting with Roberto da Silva, who looms in my memory like a crippled hero from a time of giants. Then my phone vibrates and I pull it out of my pants pocket. The message from Chanya is simple enough: HE’S HERE. FOR BUDDHA’S SAKE HELP.

  For a long moment I blink at the phone, unable to take it in. Now I realize who he is and I’m trying to get her on the phone. No answer. I’m sweating, I can feel my face twitching with fear and rage. I put money on the table for the food, stand in the street to stop a cab that already has a passenger, a farang. I flash my police ID: “Emergency.” The farang gets out grudgingly at first, then speeds up when he sees my face. He starts to say, “I’m not paying—”

  I cut him off, push him out of the way, tell the cab driver to ignore the rules, just get me there. I sit beside him, frantically trying to get someone on the phone, anyone who knows her: my mother, her mother, her closest friends. Finally, I have the brilliant idea of calling our next-door neighbor.

  “Someone came about half an hour ago, I happened to be looking out the window.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  “So what did he look like?”

  “No need to shout. He was tall, young, a farang.” A snicker. “Very good-looking, blond, a real pinup.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “I don’t know. I only looked out for a moment. I’m not a nosey person.” She adds, “Don’t worry, she’s a good girl, you know, very kind and devout, I’m sure—”

  I cut her off.

  —

  At the hovel I throw some twenty-baht bills at the cab driver, run to the front door, knock, ring, and fumble with my keys at the same time. It doesn’t help that someone has closed the drapes so I cannot see inside. When I enter it’s quite dark. I switch on the lights. A flood of relief: Chanya is there, sitting on her chair by her computer. A flood of terror: she isn’t moving. A flood of relief: I can see she is breathing. There is something strange about her, though. She is rigid. When I touch her I feel a vibration. She is shivering in a way I’ve never seen before: a constant shaking of her whole body, but high-frequency shortwaves as if she is plugged into some machine. I turn her face to look at her. Her eyes are open windows to the terror within. I tap her gently on the shoulder, grab a bottle of red wine I’ve been meaning to drink one happy evening when this damned case is over, open it, pour her a mugful. She opens her mouth, allows me to pour some in. When it starts to drip down her chin she snaps out of her coma, swallows, reaches for the mug, downs it. I pour some more.

  “He was here,” she gasps. “That thing of yours. He came.”

  “What did he do?”

  She shakes her head. “Nothing. Sonchai, that’s what is so incredibly scary. He didn’t need to do anything. He just stood there. Oh, Buddha, I’ve never known anything like it. This big, slim, gorgeous man with the most beautiful hands and Hollywood good looks simply stood there and scared the living shit out of me. He’s not human. Whatever it is he gives off, it’s not human. You can’t be around him. I saw that at the fight, but I was too far away to understand. I thought he was just some super soldier the CIA had created—I had no idea what it really meant, that something like that could actually exist. His eyes.” She gulps some more wine.

  “He didn’t say anything?”

  She shakes her head. “Oh, yes, he did.”

  “What?”

  She stares at me and starts to shake again. I try to hold her, but she pushes me away. She is not shaking with terror, but with a kind of high, disbelieving laughter. “He said, ‘Happy birthday to you.’ For tomorrow.” She shakes her head at me as if to say, Can you believe this? “You forgot, so did I. He remembered.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “That you had to meet him for your birthday lunch. You must not tell anyone else. And you must not bring a weapon. If you told anyone or brought a weapon, he would know. But otherwise you would be perfectly safe. He did not want to hurt a hair on your head.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Then he said, ‘Tell my brother I’m sorry if I’ve been rude.’ ” She looks at me. “That was the weirdest of all. Like he just appears from nowhere, scares me to death, then worries that he might have offended you. Like he’s broken some minor social rule, when he’s, you know, the living walking image of something totally alien that doesn’t belong, like something that just got off a spaceship—and he says it again, in a polite tone, quite apologetic as if he was really concerned: ‘Tell my brother I’m sorry if I’ve been rude.’ But at the same time the psychic gouging was deliberate, he started to feed off my terror and had to control himself. I could feel him doing things to my guts, just by staring, boring straight into my womb. He knew what he was doing. He kind of paralyzed me with perverted lust that twisted my guts. He had to literally snap out of it, or he would have had his fun with me. I would have been like that poor girl whose murder you’re investigating, body parts all over the house.” She poured herself some more wine. “That’s beyond screwed up, Sonchai, that’s way beyond psycho. And I could tell, he has perfect mental organization—I bet he would come out sane and well-balanced in any test. Probably a model citizen.”

  “A model citizen,” I repeat, grabbing the bottle and swallowing some wine before she drinks it all. We stare at each other.

  “I forgot,” Chanya says, drunk now. “He left you this.”

  She takes a packet from the table. “I wondered if it was a bomb and if I should leave it outside. But he’s not like that. He’s much more intimate than that. He fucks you with his mind before he tears your head off.” She hands it to me. It can only be a book, a paperback, wrapped in satin with red, white, and blue stripes. I pull off the wrappings and show the book to Chanya: The Gospel of Judas. I heft the gift for a moment while Chanya watches. When I open it the inscription reads:

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

  To my dear brother, long lost, found now.

  I show Chanya the message and open the book. The central argument of The Gospel of Judas is that it was Judas Iscariot, not John, whom the Christ loved most. Judas, the only disciple with any worldly sense, is set up by Jesus as the fall guy for the most brilliant piece of theater of
all time called the Crucifixion. In other words, it turns Christianity on its head.

  Now my phone bleeps:

  Birthday lunch tomorrow, Dear One? Do you know Nandino’s? It’s on the river. They have a private room. I’ll book. Twelve forty-five for one o’clock? Smart casual.

  “You won’t go, will you?” Chanya asks. “He could just kill you on a whim, rip your head off like—”

  “Of course I’m going,” I say, staring at the book and the neat handwriting. “How can I not?”

  “Because you’re a cop?”

  “No. Because I’m a lost soul.”

  32

  “Please, do have some grissini,” the Asset says. “Freshly baked this morning. I told them I want the highest standards, no shortcuts, for I have a very special guest.” I take one of the breadsticks Superman is offering me. We both crunch for a moment. “Hmm, they baked them with rosemary. Excellent, don’t you think?”

  “Ah, yes, very good,” I say truthfully, “very, very good.”

  As an expression of his good manners he has seated me in a chair facing the panoramic window. I have a perfect view of the Chao Phraya River behind him: rice barges, tourist yachts, long-tail water buses, sampans, rowboats. It’s busy.

  “Do you love Italian food as much as do I?” he asks in that silky, well-washed voice.

  “Actually, yes, I do enjoy it more than any other farang cuisine.”

  “Let’s face it, everything worth having in Europe originates in Italy. Especially the food. French is basically Italian with a truckload of butter and cream thrown at it. Of course, the word Italian covers a thousand dishes. I don’t mind the poverty cuisines of Sicily and the south, but it doesn’t have the finesse or variety of the north. No, it’s got to be Tuscan or Piemonte.” I blink at him for a moment and continue munching. His blue eyes shine. “Shall I tell you what you are thinking? You are thinking my, my, what breadth of education and culture they gave him, this Asset. Am I right?” I cough. “But let us return to the small talk. Italian, yes, basically, the whole of modern Western culture originates in my hometown.” He smiles and crunches on another grissini.