The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “Your hometown?”

  He shrugs. “One of them. I can’t say I’m exactly proud, but there you are.” A pause. “We’ll come to that shortly.”

  I shake my head. The frightening thing is that he is not crazy. It is just as Chanya observed: a perfectly organized brain of the highest intelligence. Now the waiter brings a full bread basket with seven-cereal rolls and a tapenade of anchovies. Every Thai loves anchovies; they taste like the sauces we make from rotten fish.

  “Could you tell me—I mean, I’m very flattered—but, why, exactly, would you want to celebrate my birthday, at such short notice?”

  “Orders from the Doc. He got stoned with you, didn’t he? Just like him, goes on one of his opium trips, spills his guts, still high the next day and still spilling, then a couple of days later he’s paranoid about security. He wanted me to check you out. I told him not to worry, the detective is my half brother, I trust him implicitly with everything.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that, so I let a few beats pass. “So how are your—our—brothers and sisters?”

  He frowns. “If I gave the impression they are still alive, I’m afraid I misled you for sentimental reasons. They all took their own lives. I’m the only one left. They pushed us too hard, you see? It’s the way they are, destructive testing is all they know.”

  “I’m, ah, sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. I was the only one willing to go all the way. They had no idea what all the way meant, of course. Clumsy fools. But, as you see, it all worked out brilliantly in the end.” He gives me an assessing smile. “Now they are wondering if there is something special in our genes—the ones we inherited from our father.” He shrugs. “But it’s just speculation. Personally, I’m not convinced genes have anything to do with our mutual survival. After all, as I told you, our siblings all failed.”

  “Who is they?”

  He pretends not to have heard my question. I’m in a dilemma here. If I simply continue to humor him, he will become irritated. On the other hand, how else can I handle it? In normal social intercourse one breaks through a level of basic politeness to something more intimate. But with him? As usual he has read my mind. It took one flash of those unreal eyes.

  “Shall I tell you what the problem is? You will be surprised at how simply it may be expressed.”

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  “My name. You have not asked me and I have not offered. In your head you still think of me simply as the Asset, do you not?”

  “Yes,” I confess.

  “Ordinarily you would have asked how you should call me—but in my case a name like Jack or John, or even something exotic like Ermenegildo or Bartholomew, wouldn’t do it, would it?” He giggles.

  “No.”

  “And you think the reason is I am not like others, I’m too different, too weird to deserve or be capable of carrying an ordinary human name—correct?”

  If he had used a different tone I might have been afraid of some kind of paranoid outbreak, but he is relaxed, in control, and even slightly humorous in his manner. The waiter brings two tiny langoustine cups as amuse-bouches. We devour them in one swallow and call for more grissini.

  “Shall I tell you my real name—at least insofar as any name can be said to be real? Let’s put it another way—would you like to know who I am, really?”

  I realize I must answer each of his questions with total honesty. “I’m not sure,” I say.

  He grins. “Excellent. Yes, you are quite right. And the reason you are not sure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because the answer is quite daunting. I know you sense it, though, for you are very intuitive, like me. I’ll give you a clue. It is fortunate that you are a Buddhist. Someone of a more Western persuasion might have a nervous breakdown. So, can you guess?”

  “No.”

  “Tut-tut. I think you can. But you are too polite. Or afraid of being laughed at. You must not be. I won’t have you anything but frank and open—so much do I love you, my brother.”

  “I’m lost. Okay, tell me.”

  “I am Jesus Christ, of course.” The grissini sticks in my throat, I cough. “Oh, I don’t mean in some ridiculous way of the mentally ill. I can see that thought just flitted across your mind. No, I mean as a matter of pure cultural logic, that is what I am: the Second Coming. Think about it. Two thousand years of unmitigated lies, nauseating superstition, mental and physical torture, genocide, corruption culminating in two world wars which were Christian wars—and nothing but war and exploitation ever since—in the end the West must produce the living image of its own twisted path. Me. I am the alpha and the omega, but more importantly I am the Thing Itself.” He smiles. “After all, one does need an identity of some kind—at least for the moment. Oh, you must not think of me as that poor jerk on a cross. That was, shall we say, the give-them-a-chance phase. No, if anything I’m more the guy in the middle on the back wall of the Sistine Chapel. Why shouldn’t I kill and send to hell those who have failed me so badly?”

  There is indignation in the stiffening of his spine and the flash of his eyes. I decide to plunge into the asparagus crepes, which are really very good, before taking the matter further.

  “That’s why you said Rome was your hometown?”

  “I said one of them. I do go there a lot. I have a frequent visitor’s pass for the Sistine Chapel. Jerusalem is still hard for me, and as for Bethlehem—have you been there?”

  “No.”

  “I can assure you that these days it’s not at all the kind of place where you’d expect to find three wise men and a virgin.” He gives a great chesty guffaw.

  I stare, openmouthed. What kind of monster is this?

  “Actually, it always was a squalid little dump.” He laughs some more. “Is this difficult for you? But as a Buddhist you are aware of the basic truth of rebirth, are you not?”

  I hesitate. “Yes.”

  “So, you know that in this body one finds only a segment of the whole person, who is, by the way, androgynous. To find the whole being you must add in all the previous lifetimes. Well, someone has to be Jesus, don’t they?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And don’t tell me you are not aware that my message two thousand years ago was basically Buddhist with a few politically correct references to the Old Testament to keep the Pharisees off my back?”

  I cannot eat anymore, appetite cannot survive such conversation. I give up and put down my knife and fork.

  “It’s quite true that I did ten years in a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir two thousand years ago.” He frowns. “I had a wonderful time, but all the while there was this awful sense of doom, you know, because I had to go back and get myself crucified. Put rather a dampener on the experience.” He smiles. “But not to worry, it’s all over now. Revenge is mine, I will repay.” He pauses to look me full in the face. “And you will help me.”

  The confession that he is God has relaxed him the way a good confession relaxes some perps. It is as if we have exchanged vows of loyalty and now he can speak freely. I decide to try to obtain an admission to the crime of murder by God. I do not have any recording equipment, it would be only my word against his, I would probably not get a conviction, but it would bring some kind of closure.

  “Naturally, as Christ you rely entirely on the Father.”

  “Naturally.”

  “You would not kill without his…direction?”

  “He feeds me, like any father. I owe him everything.”

  If only he wasn’t sane, there would be no threat to my worldview. I take three folded pieces of paper from my jacket pocket and smooth them out in front of him. One is a fish-eye view of a murder scene in which a young woman has been beheaded. The second concentrates on her head, which has been wrenched from her shoulders. The third is a shot of a mirror on which someone has written in blood, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is.

  Up to this point I had no idea what my next move would be. I had
to know how he assimilated his past actions. How does God deal with his own bad behavior? Will he wrench my head from my shoulders? I am using crude but well-tried tactics here. Now that I have confronted him with hard evidence that a savage killer lives in that splendid body of his along with Jesus Christ, will he explode? Collapse in remorse? Find some theological way around it? But this is a totally new breed of human and he doesn’t do any of those things. His training takes over. He turns the pictures around under his hand, examining them curiously.

  “This happened where? Why wasn’t I told? Okay, you won’t tell me because I did it. Let us form a plan. We’ll try to catch me together. Let us work it out. You were assigned to the case, so it has to be District 8. The killer—me—has a connection with you, therefore any repeat crime will happen in District 8. That’s got to be where I strike next, and I will strike again, because my purpose is to obtain and retain your attention. Why?” He frowns. “Because of the way I was conceived, brought up, enhanced, and trained—I am a killer freak from B movies, a kind of Frankenstein, in desperate need of normal human love and kindness, of a family. I desperately want and need to impress you because in my mind you are all I’ve got, being of close kin. In reality I don’t have anyone at all, I’m deceiving myself that you are in the least interested in me as a brother. All you want is to solve the case, make the streets safe again for young girls, lock me up for life. I am this pathetic fellow so riven by madness he dares not acknowledge the total contradiction between two halves of himself. As in classic psychosis, the one half of the personality is hermetically sealed off from the other. What it all points to is that I not only will kill again soon, but it will be in this same market—the one behind your police station, is it not?”

  He pauses to look at me. “That’s the obvious reading, anyway. Have I got it right?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but frowns deeply as if he is consulting himself on where he plans to strike next. “A little too obvious, perhaps—you are not entirely convinced, although I’m sure your colleagues would fall for it. But, yes, it will have to be the market again—if I’m so smart, strong, and powerful, I would naturally want to taunt you in the most provocative way.” He looks up at me for a moment, says, “Don’t worry, we’ll catch me,” smiles cheerfully, then returns to the documents I gave him.

  I have shifted back from the table, forcing my chair against the wall. This is revealing behavior on my part. If I were physically afraid, I could easily have run out of the restaurant. But you cannot run from this kind of fear. The end of the world does not need any component of violence to terrify us. Here is a man of superhuman powers who wants to recruit me into hunting himself.

  I make an excuse to break off the lunch. He looks up, nods at me briefly, and returns to his study of the scene of the crime. He does not seem surprised or offended. I feel an intense frustration that he didn’t break and confess. I want to yell at him, rub his face in the evidence: No, you are not Jesus, you are a psychopath. I guess every shrink has wanted to do that from time to time. But I’m not a shrink, I’m a cop. Until now the weirdness of the world has been clearly defined by law and practice. Outside of those definitions I’m as lost as you, R. I stand up, make my apology, stare at him in disbelief. Already he has made those pieces of paper his own. He will find the perp. Using his training and enhancements he will track himself down sooner or later.

  What kind of insanity is this? Is he telling me he will murder again, in that same market, as a way of relating to me? When balance fails the mind can go on twisting forever, it seems.

  33

  If another child dies at that monster’s hands it will be my fault. Fear of future guilt drives me now. At the market I stand among a confusion of people, wild-eyed and mad. Fruits, vegetables, and cheap clothes from China and Vietnam are everywhere for sale along with downmarket cell phones and a lot of plastic covers for iPhone and Samsung products. There is a phone repair stall at one corner, a knife sharpener at another, a seller of red and yellow plastic buckets at a third, and dozens of cheap clothing and shoe stalls in between. The stalls being lawless, no one has the authority to impose order, so that every last inch of the disputed land is occupied rent free. I am wondering how, exactly, I might try to protect every kid in sight. I am sweating in the morning heat. This is stress. Oh, yes, this is stress. I am thinking how much I hate transhumans when my cell phone bleeps: Shit hits fan, Goldman ballistic, meet KKM, food stall now.

  There are no customers at the khao kha moo stall, except one who is staring into space. When I draw up a chair at her table she flashes me a momentary glance then continues to gaze. I am instantly irritated. I cough: no reaction. Wearily and shaking my head I pull out my phone and read the SMS aloud: “Shit hits fan, Goldman ballistic, meet KKM, food stall now.”

  Krom remains staring dull-eyed into the distance. I try to remember from my teens what gambit works best in reply to this opening. I get up to leave. As I do so, she finally speaks: “She told you I made a pass at her and she rejected me and we didn’t have sex—didn’t she?”

  I scratch my beard, stunned, for the moment, at the disconnect with the SMS and my mood. “Yes.”

  “You believe her?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t even know if I care.”

  “Really? That’s unusual, a man generally cares very much what a rival does with his wife. When the rival is a dyke it makes men crazy.”

  She takes out her smart phone and shows me a video that lasts less than a minute. The naked woman on her back is certainly Krom, that is obvious from the full-body tattoo. But as for the tongue that elegantly begins its homage at her feet and leads us up the tom’s right leg all the way to the moist, parted, and panting labia—the identity of its owner is less clear. All I see is some jet-black hair from behind that could be Chanya’s but might just as well belong to another Asian woman. True, there is a momentary quarter profile in which I catch a glimpse of a cheek and nose that look familiar—but there is no certainty. I study the clip with some intensity, though, and replay it a couple of times before handing it back.

  “Who was holding the camera?” I ask. Krom looks away. “Chanya never mentioned a third person.”

  Krom takes back the smart phone. “Do you want to see the whole video? I’ll e-mail it to you if you like.”

  As she speaks she is flashing me little sly glances full of schadenfreude.

  “No,” I say. “If you had a clip of Chanya that was recognizable you would have it on your phone. You’re bluffing.” Then another word comes to mind, one that has acquired a special significance recently. “Feeding, aren’t you?” I say.

  It is an unusual word to use, but accuracy can startle. Krom blinks several times, and for a moment looks confused, as if she has been called out doing something everyone does. Don’t we all love to see the emotional pain of others? Aren’t we all voyeurs at heart? her look says. Then she sees that I disagree. No, not everyone gets off on that, I signal back, not everyone is a predator of the heart. And now she does that special thing I’ve come to associate with the enhanced: she snaps out of it, goes deep within herself, and in a few seconds she has changed mood and personality. Now she gives me the big welcoming smile. She wants to ignore completely the last few minutes—not to mention the evening she spent with Chanya—so we can be buddies again, quite as if she has not seduced, or tried to seduce, my wife. It seems like a good moment to strike.

  “So, Krom, tell me more about being enhanced, how did it happen in your case?”

  “Can’t tell you. Classified, for the moment. You’re not ready yet.”

  “Something happens, doesn’t it, to people, those very lucky special people who belong to the club?”

  “What club?”

  “The only one that matters anymore—at least, that’s the sense of the story so far. The club of the enhanced.”

  I don’t think it is a particularly brilliant question, so I am surprised when it has the effect of changing Krom’s posture. For a moment I think she is
finally going to open up.

  “Yes, I guess you could say that. Special is a dangerous word. Different, though. I’d go along with that.” She smiles. “We humans all have a distant folk memory of a time when we could fly. You could say this memory makes all of us miserable, but some more than others: we are the species that fell to earth and lost its wings out of sheer stupidity. But if something happens and by some incredible piece of luck you get your wings back—yes, then when you look at other people you’re looking at what you used to be—”

  “A lower form of life?” She purses her lips. “You have the same relish for the sufferings of others as him, don’t you? You are the new aristocracy, you transhumans. Inwardly you are the billionaires in your limos driving through a slum and despising everyone and everything you see.”

  She seems to think hard about that. “Yes,” she says brightly. “Yes, that’s quite true. How clever of you to see it so clearly.”

  “But you also have the fatal weakness of all winners. You need to feed off emotions you no longer feel, to which you no longer have any right. You are no longer in the human family—love is shut off for you. All that’s left is to despise and destroy the happiness of others. You are a vampire.”

  She snorts. “Love? You and Chanya are bored to death with each other. I brought you both fun, danger, knowledge. And I found out about your father’s buddy, da Silva.”

  “Yes. Why exactly did you do that? Because you knew how much pain lay down that road?”

  “I try to help you when I can—we’re friends, aren’t we?” She lets a few beats pass, gives a bright smile. I think, Feelings have no currency in this community. Then she says, “So, have we had the catharsis already? Can we be friends again now?” She giggles. “Maybe vampire isn’t such a bad rap. With seven billion humans full of blood, it’s a smart choice of food source. Let me be your very special tame vampire, I’ll protect you from the competition.”