The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t show off, should I?”

  “Do you need to?”

  He gives me the divine smile. “It’s all your fault, for being such a perfect elder sibling, it makes me a little giggly. But we are still not fully bonded, are we? I’m not sure. From time to time you look bewildered, my brother. Sometimes you have an expression on your face that tells me I’m violating some cultural rule of intimacy they never told me about. I wouldn’t know, we didn’t do a lot of love training at the camp. There were tons of torchlight processions down into the depths of the cave, with cannibalism as a kind of ultimate consummation. That was the big event: eating someone else.”

  He pauses and rebuilds the adoring smile. “Shall I tell you a secret? I first saw you from a distance some time ago—more than a month. Goldman pointed you out. We were in Soi Cowboy and you were about to enter your mother’s bar. The minute I saw you I knew that you were my brother. I was stunned. I knew you immediately. It was my baptism in the Jordan, that’s when I became the Messiah of this age. After that I couldn’t stop myself, every few days I would slip back to the soi to take pictures of you. I must have taken over a hundred on that iPhone. It was such fun spying on you like that. And then making sure you received the phone—and the Doc’s number in Contacts. I was in agony for days wondering when you’d finally get through to him. The old fool turns his phone off when he wants to think about something. Or when he’s on one of his opium binges. Or when he’s on acid—especially when he’s on acid and…Well, he’s a different man. I expect he struck you as a wonderful, eccentric, brilliant, charming, highly polished old English gent, did he not? Those are merely relics of a personality he used to own, before Angkor. He needs opium to keep up the pretense. Acid reveals the truth.”

  The Asset gives a grandfatherly smile and folds his arms over his stomach. “Then, when you did call him, he had to call me right away because I hadn’t told him about you and he didn’t know where you were coming from at all. What a laugh—he was mad as hell, but he forgave me. Poor old Doc. And I was the one who insisted he take you to the camp, because I wanted you to know everything, you are my only living blood relation on this earth, aside from that old guy in the hospital.”

  “Tell me about the opium. It’s terribly injurious, especially for a man his age. Why doesn’t he use LSD all the time?”

  The Asset gives me a shrewd look, as if I’ve stumbled on an inconvenient truth. “He takes the Spirit only rarely these days. Very rarely. You could even say he uses opium to avoid acid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when he’s on LSD his demon takes over completely. That’s really what all this is about, you know.” The Asset lets this bomb drop with a yawn. “He sold his soul to the great demon of Angkor forty years ago on a ten-day acid binge, but he’ll never admit it.” He checks my face. “That doesn’t mean the project won’t succeed. The opposite. With a demon like that backing us, how can we lose? The Khmer spirits are taking over the world again, using the weapon they know best: magic.” He smiles conspiratorially: “It’s quite fun, isn’t it?”

  I realize that, outlandish though it seems, this is as sincere as the Asset is able to be. He really means that he is the Messiah. Frankly, R, I am experiencing the original policeman’s hell here: stuck with a perp who won’t stop confessing and no power of arrest.

  “But Jesus, you are not Jesus,” I say. “You murder, you intimidate, you mutilate, you hypnotize men into killing their nearest and dearest, you scared my wife half to death, you are a war machine—” I stop, ashamed of my own exasperation.

  “Hmm, the military lobby does keep cropping up, doesn’t it? It’s a concession we had to make. The Doc says I’ll grow out of the boy-soldier stuff pretty soon now. I’m sorry I scared your wife, it’s a kind of reflex they taught us.”

  “What is?”

  “Scaring the shit out of people: psychic dominance, to give it its military title. It’s quite clever, it involves all sorts of subtle factors like standing at a certain distance, control over facial features, total physical superiority, posture, and something you do with your eyes that isn’t mystical but looks it, then you call attention to the very sensitive area around the mark’s navel, which is a terrific fear center—and basically you convince the mark that you have killed many times before and might be about to do so again, which isn’t difficult when it’s true. It’s part of riot-control training. You pick a pack leader and reduce him to a whimpering wreck without even touching him. Very effective.”

  “But the killings?”

  “Dy yang sia yang,” he says in a perfect Thai accent. Roughly translated: You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs. “If I killed them, it must have been the will of God, mustn’t it? The Doc and I talked about that a lot. ‘Transcend killing by turning it into an art form,’ he advised. ‘Everyone has to die, but not everyone dies in the form of a handcrafted masterpiece—think of your victims as privileged to be killed by you. Above all, the Messiah is an artist.’ ”

  “Dr. Christmas Bride said that?”

  “Mm, when he was on acid, the old devil.” He gives me a grand smile. “Anyway, I don’t do violence anymore, I’m bored with it.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I killed Sakagorn and Goldman. Just one little murder of the right person in the right place at the right time did the trick. What a liberation! My evolution has speeded up, just as the Doc predicted. You must have noticed. In a couple of months I’ll be the type who bursts into tears at the sight of a dead sparrow. But there is one thing I owe you, isn’t there? One more gesture before I slouch over to Bethlehem to be reborn.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This,” the Asset says, and reaches behind his head to remove his graphene mask. It is a striptease: slowly a wide brow emerges, then eyebrows, then the eyes…He completes the unveiling with a quick pull, and now, finally, I am looking into the face of the devil, who could also be Christ. I cover my mouth. “Oh, no!”

  It is simply too much. The poor mind eternally misled by everything thanks to the myth of the normal, the ordinary, is now confronted by the impossible, the extraordinary—and does its best to turn off. I’m holding on to the swing, white-knuckled with stress, wonder, and horror, for it is the face of Dr. Christmas Bride! Not, to be sure, aged eighty-plus, but that Bride of the ancient photo taken with a Kodachrome more than fifty years ago: young, godlike, brilliant, and mad.

  “God made me in his own image,” the Asset says, a tad forlorn. “I’ve never shown anyone before, only you and the Doc know. What do you think?”

  “How did he do it? Plastic surgery isn’t that advanced. Are you sure that’s not another mask under the mask?”

  “Genius always finds a way,” he says, still in that slightly doubtful tone. He shrugs, smiles, and replaces the graphene mask. Just then the doorbell rings.

  “Ah!” he says.

  We return to the house and he uses a remote to open the front door. Footsteps in the hall.

  —

  I am able to guess who it is, for the occasion, which is religious, calls for a specific kind of devotee, one whose dedication is blind and therefore absolute.

  “Matthew,” the Asset says with a smile. “On time as usual.”

  The FBI is not Thai and yet he offers that most perfect expression of local devotion known as the high wai. He raises palms pressed together as high as his forehead and smiles at the Asset with uncritical adoration that seems to say, Kill me if it be your pleasure, I will never know a greater god than you.

  Or something like that. It’s a little embarrassing, but also impressive. He gives me the high wai, too, I guess to acknowledge me as God’s half brother. This is heady stuff. I find my imagination channeling what one knows about the origin of churches: a small group of dedicated followers with a message so powerful it redirects humanity. The sort of community, in other words, that pariahs like me never join. The Asset flashes me a look as if he knows what I’m thinking.


  “Matthew,” he says and puts an arm around the FBI, “there’s one special little thing I’d like you to do for me, right now. I want you to tell my dearly beloved brother your story—in that succinct lawyer’s way of yours. Just the essential parts. He is a very quick study, essentials only will do.”

  I do not think the moment has been rehearsed; it didn’t need to be. Fanatics have only one song to sing, and they don’t need much prompting.

  “I was lost,” the FBI confesses. “A man, my father, escapes the corrupt, criminal, despotic, repressive police state of China and lands in the corrupt, criminal, despotic, repressive police state of the USA. What formula for survival does he pass on to his son? It is this: Above all, be impeccable in your hypocrisy, let not a drop of the human seep out of the polythene with which you have packaged yourself. Replace affection with Teflon, love with ambition, fairness with ruthlessness, the milk of human kindness with the acid needed to burn your way to the top. And never let your agony show.”

  He pauses and gives a quick glance to the Asset, who nods, smiling.

  In a trembling voice the FBI continues: “This was excellent advice. Without it I never would have lasted. But what is the use of lasting? As the spirit was slowly crushed in me, it responded by burning all the hotter. I was sure I would explode. I became fascinated by stories of young men who stockpile firearms before their terrible coming out. I recognized a godseed in me that was violated with every conforming thought or act, that was drowning in the superficial. No matter how much the world rewarded me, I condemned me for the coward and slave I had become. But where was the real message? Who was speaking words of truth? Who had the strength and the vision to show the way out?”

  He stops shyly. There is great courage and sensitivity in the way he forces himself to look at me with tears in his eyes. “I once was lost but now I’m found,” he says and turns away.

  I see in him what, I suppose, most people would see: a man, no longer exactly young, who has chronically failed to find love. My mind flashes to my darling, if wayward, Chanya. Compared to him, I am lucky.

  “See what I mean?” the Asset whispers to me out of the corner of his mouth. “See the hunger that drives him? There are billions burning in silence just like that. Humanity festers in its clingwrap.”

  Now the Asset says something to the FBI. The FBI nods, shakes his head to clear it, and smiles at me with evangelical warmth.

  “Matthew will take you to see some friends who will help with your initiation,” the Asset says. He turns on his heels and abruptly returns to the garden.

  I have become used to sudden changes in my half brother; this is the first time he has been quite so open in his arrogance, like one who perceives that the need for patience and civility is almost over. Like a man whose time has come.

  I do not recall consenting to any initiation; nevertheless, I follow the FBI out of the house and sit next to him in the back of the sky-blue Rolls-Royce. The driver knows where to go, and within about ten minutes we arrive at the old Siamese house on stilts in the middle of the jungle of high-rises. During the ride I send SMSs to Chanya and try to call her several times, but as before there is no reply. The first, sly suspicion that the Asset has sent me away from him so that he can abduct her enters my vulnerable heart.

  Matthew waits in the limo while I climb the stairs to the front door. I have no doubt all has been arranged and choreographed and that Krom will answer.

  The door does open on the first press of the bell, but it is Madame Gloria Ching who opens it. Her eyes stare sightless at the sky while she sniffs me. We wai each other politely and she invites me in.

  “You’ve just missed Krom, who popped out on an errand,” she says in those hyper-English tones and adds a smile as she leads me clicking down the corridor.

  “I don’t believe you,” I say, mimicking her smile.

  The contradiction startles her for a moment, then she relaxes. “Of course, I should remind myself, a detective is not an ordinary human being.” She turns her blind eyes to me and breathes deeply. “You’re right, it was decided that I would have a few words with you first.”

  We are in the panoramic back room with all the perfume bottles. As before, I am overwhelmed by the range of aromas that hit me in half a dozen vulnerable and exotic places. It is impossible not to feel high and intrigued in this room, as if a thousand mysteries could be solved through the subtle computations of smell.

  Gloria Ching settles herself on the sofa. “I am supposed to simply tell you about myself. I grew up suddenly during the Cultural Revolution, before I was smuggled out of the PRC. I experienced collective barbarism close up. Basically, there has always been and will always be two kinds of humanity. Up to now the civilized have kept the hordes at bay with technology. Now that technology has risen to a different level. We no longer need the masses, they can be replaced by machines. Their riots and revolutions can be put down, we have no need to be intimidated anymore. Let them have their pornography and their football and their TV series while we-the-saved take over. The New Humans are simply those with the civilization and the learning skills to acquire talents that would only destroy the inferior half of our species.” She turns her head to the ceiling. “If I were in your place, I would be thrilled at the chance to get on the program at all. To have the kind of future they are offering you, as brother to the Messiah—you have it made, my friend. You are literally the luckiest man on earth. That’s what they wanted me to tell you. And now I think I hear Krom in the hall.”

  Gloria Ching takes me, clicking, to the door and opens it on Krom, who cannot look me in the eye. I follow to her room, which is not at all what I expected: none of the ruthless minimalism of a willful dyke, more like the boudoir of a practiced seducer. All over the room, including the ceiling, the female form is celebrated in oils, watercolors, photographs, and, naturally, lady lamps. The counterpane on the bed is midnight-blue silk; a replica of a primeval mother goddess, with huge breasts, belly, and vagina, hangs on the wall above.

  “Chanya was here with you, wasn’t she?” I say. “I can feel it. Where is she? What have you done with her?”

  “She’s safe, Sonchai. You’ll see her very soon. You’re nearly there, man. Just one more hurdle to go.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She seems about to reply, then changes her mind. “The way we’re doing it, we’re showing you the life stories of different initiates, but you already know mine.”

  The room sports a bentwood rocker in a bay window that looks over the garden. I cannot bear to look at her, so I sit in it, staring out at the frangipani trees and the bougainvillea, the pond and the cats all prone around it. She speaks while I stare.

  “You know what I was, because you’ve seen so many examples. A trashy dykey piece of female garbage that nobody wanted, a total nonentity like someone dying at the bottom of a well. I think you know what I’m talking about. I think you’ve been there. There’s only one thing that remains when you’re in that state. Just two primeval words that won’t go away: I am. It’s not a lesson you ever forget. I am plus body. My beautiful, young, female body that so loves to be with other female bodies. Basically life is either money or sex, and for me it was a no-brainer. Naturally, I had them give me the sex App soon as I was ready.”

  “There’s a sex App?”

  She draws a chair up and sits obliquely behind me so that I can feel her breath on the back of my neck.

  “Sonchai, it’s not just because you’re a man that you have no idea. Most women don’t realize either.”

  “What?”

  “What a world of sensuality lies just under a woman’s skin. Thousands of years of male jealousy and dominance have left us stupefied and totally cut off from our own sexual identity, which ought to be so vivid, so life-filled. There are ways of releasing that, my friend, ways for a woman to come out, to wake up to her deep, hungry, life-affirming power.”

  “You used some kind of drug on her?”

 
; “Don’t kid yourself, it’s not just a matter of chemicals. It’s something inside so deeply denied…As the song says. You know that much about her. I can help you. That of which I speak is not exclusively homosexual. Even a man can learn how to enhance a woman’s sensuality. I have to give her back to you, anyway. There, I’ve said it. I’m not allowed to keep her. You are the brother of the Messiah, you win. You only have to join us, which you almost have anyway.”

  “But why is everyone so keen on me, Krom? I’m flattered. Why is it so damn important that I become one of you?”

  “Your genes, Sonchai. I don’t know the details. It seems all your father’s kids at the camp were unusually gifted. After he met you, Dr. Bride confirmed that you seemed to have those characteristics, that same kind of genius.”

  We let quite a few beats pass, then Krom coughs and starts to talk again.

  “Face it, Sonchai,” Krom says. “Chanya is all you’ve got, man, the only real relationship in the world, your only anchor. Would you even be able to sleep tonight if you went home without her? Or tomorrow? Or the next night?”

  I let that hang, refusing to respond.

  “It’s all over for the nonenhanced, Sonchai. You’re an elitist yourself at some level. You’re certainly a lot smarter than average, and you detest most of modern culture. Even without enhancement you’re all too alert to the pathetic state of the world—the imminent squalor of war and economic disruption that the sad seven billion homunculi are going to live through during the next few centuries: you’ve seen that. You want a superbrain, a superbody, membership of the new race of humans who really will reach the stars—admit it, you do, don’t you?”

  “I don’t give a damn about any of that, I want to see Chanya,” I say. “I want to hear her tell me how she feels, what she wants to do.”