“I was talking to Auntie Summorn today,” Mair said.
See? A mere sip and she was about to confess to the police.
“How is she?” I asked, and elbowed her in the kidney.
“She was very well,” she said. “She was telling me about her son. I’m sure you’ve run across Auntie Summorn’s son, General…”
Chompu pepped up at the address.
“Mair, I – ”
“His name’s Daeng,” she continued. “He’s our local villain.”
“We know him very well.” Chompu nodded. “Very well.”
“Then you’d probably be surprised to hear he’s given up drinking and applied to enter the monkhood for a month.”
“And I’m thinking of having my left leg amputated because I’ve lost a sock,” was Chompu’s response.
Mair chuckled.
“It’s official,” she said. “He’s signed up for detox at Wat Ny Kow.”
“Then wonders will never cease,” said the policeman. “Whatever’s come over him?”
“Oh, I just think a man comes to a point in his life when he gets tired of running away from his conscience. All his past deeds catch up with him and…I mean, they’re coming from different directions, obviously, the conscience and the deeds, otherwise they’d be bumping into each other and complicating things. But that’s probably when his life turns around…because of all that jostling.”
Mair had a way with idioms. Chompu looked from me to Granddad Jah and we both shrugged.
“Well, then here’s to villain Daeng,” said Chompu, raising his glass and downing the contents. I clinked my glass against Mair’s and sniffed her cheek.
“Well done, Mair,” I whispered in her ear. She threw back half her drink and smacked her lips and fluttered her eyes.
“General Chompu,” she slurred, “do you know I once tied a police officer to a bamboo raft and set him off down the Kok River? It was – ”
“All right, girl. You’ve had enough,” said Granddad Jah, taking her half-empty glass. “She makes up stories when she’s drunk.”
“I do not. His name was Police Sergeant Major Grit Maleenon. He was naked because he – ”
“Mair!”
She grabbed back her glass and laughed. We were saved the rest of the story by the arrival of our truck. In fact, hearing Mair’s story might have been better. It was a moment I’d been secretly dreading, so I can’t imagine how Mair felt. Arny had invited his girlfriend (and I use the term with generous caution) for dinner. The spread in front of us was all cold. Arny was half an hour late.
“Ah! Cue for the handsome and discreet officer to depart,” said Chompu.
Arny and a big woman had emerged from the truck. They were half in shadow but she appeared to be wearing a parachute. Luckily it was white rather than camouflaged or we might have lost sight of her completely as they walked, arm in arm, across the car park. I leaned over the table.
“Not on your life, Lieutenant. Either you sit and eat with us or I’m telling the police ministry you lip-sync Maria Carey on duty.”
“Bitch.”
I felt Mair slide back on the bench and into the shadows. Granddad helped himself to a dozen or so new Pipers. The happy couple was holding hands by the time they arrived at our table. When Arny’s face nosed into the table-lamp light I could see the full beam of a smile and a touching look of pride as he dipped his head in the direction of his betrothed. I’d never seen that look before. Mair obviously noticed it, too. She leaned out of her shadow and smiled.
“Who do we have here?” she asked.
Arny’s companion stepped up to the table and pushed her hands together into a very respectful wai. We all returned it, apart from Granddad Jah who grunted and took a drink instead. She was a very handsome woman, dark from the sun, with a nose that I’d seen often on carved wooden native American sculptures. Her hair was as thick as tarmac and it hung down her back like a stodgy dark cape. Yes, her head was good. I’d give it an 8.2, but I couldn’t begin to score her body because of the parachute. It was somewhat worrying. It was as if she’d dropped from an airplane into a nearby field and hadn’t had time to untangle herself before dinner.
“Sorry we’re late,” said Arny, who for some reason had decided to wai us also. “We were arm wrestling about what we should wear to such a high-class dinner.”
He giggled. It was an Arny joke, made worse by an iron bar of nervous tension that was apparently welded to his spine. Granddad Jah didn’t help.
“Well, she obviously lost,” he said.
I turned to glare at my granddad and inadvertently kicked Chompu in the shin. He squealed. And that was the moment it could have all gone wrong. Arny’s face imploded, Mair’s smile became a patch of Scotch tape, and I fumbled desperately through my bag of journalistic tricks to find something diplomatic to spray on the scene. But then the girlfriend laughed. It was like the grand opening of a showroom of shiny teeth. Somewhere in the back of her throat they were smashing crystal glasses and chandeliers. It was the type of laugh that left you absolutely no choice but to join in with.
“I brought some real clothes,” she said. Her southern accent was musical and earthy as a saloon. “They’re in the truck…Unless you’d prefer to put it to the vote.”
Mair leaped to her feet and grabbed the woman’s hand.
“I’ll show you where you can change.” She smiled and we all applauded. All except for Arny who stood with his lips aquiver as the two women retreated into the darkness.
“I thought she looked nice,” he said.
I went over to him and hugged as much of him as I could.
“Nong,” I said, “you selected that dress for your lady friend, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You went shopping together and she let you choose a dress.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve got good news for you. Any woman who’d go out in public wearing that dress, just because you were sweet enough to buy it for her, has to love you very much.”
The expression on his face passed through confusion before finally alighting on joy. He laughed and I wrestled him down onto a seat. Granddad Jah fixed him a drink. By the time Mair and the girlfriend returned they were the best of friends. They probably had a lot of ancient pop songs in common; used the same brand of arthritis cream. But perhaps I’m being cruel. Arny rose to greet his lady love. She was wearing a nice shiny top that showed her toned shoulders, and huggy trousers. She certainly hadn’t let herself go since the competition days. I found her rather attractive myself but I’d never admit that to Ed’s sister. Her name, we learned, was Kanchana Aromdee, nickname, Gaew, and she was one of the most interesting women I’d met in a life spent meeting people. Even Granddad Jah took a shine to her. She entertained us with her anecdotes and listened attentively to ours. All the while she held Arny’s hand and smiled at his profile when he spoke.
♦
The Pipers were down to a dozen, and we’d eaten, and the time had tumbled on by and nobody seemed in a hurry to go home. Mair told some of her most bawdy and hilarious stories, fired by the taste of whiskey on her lips. She let slip the odd curse that drew censure from Granddad and consternation from the gallery. We talked about our Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and how we could turn its fortunes around: how we’d be the Club Med of the Gulf in six months. At one stage, Chompu had received a call from Major Suvit telling him that Mika Mikata had, in fact, traveled to Thailand on her real passport to attend an international photographic symposium in Haad Yai. Our own Pak Nam fell almost to the decimal point directly between Haad Yai and Bangkok. We toasted Granddad Jah and made him an honorary Police Major General for the night. Chompu let him wear his hat. Gaew lip-sticked an insignia on his coral white undervest and he didn’t put up a fight.
It was almost midnight when I got the call I’d been hoping for. I staggered down to the water’s edge to leave the noise of the party behind me. I sat on the sand and listened. I heard calls for my return to th
e table but I ignored them. Crabs were sizing me up but I didn’t care. I listened and I cried and I said thank you and returned to the table where Gaew was demonstrating an unbreakable armlock on the lieutenant. Mair asked me why I’d been crying and all attention turned to me. During the meal, we’d briefly talked about the killing of the abbot and the subsequent investigation, and now I had what I hoped would be the final kill.
Sissi had found a way, via impenetrable firewalls through invisible wormholes…and various other jargon I’d not understood, into Mika Mikata’s Web site. There, she’d found the most horrific gallery of murder masquerading as art: the step-by-step pool murder of the orange-hatted worker in Guam, an underwater assassination in the Great Barrier Reef set amid some of the most glorious colored corals and sea creatures, the aviary slaying in Taiwan, and the recently posted killing of an abbot in Thailand. In an attached blog, some arty farty pseudo-poetic nonsense about destiny. A location pinpointed on a map. A vague sense that saffron was calling to her. That her inner soul and the whim of the orange hat would finally come to select the perfect tableau to showcase her art. Mika Mikata was a dead duck. The Juree family had its first notch.
That night, as I was filling in the details of my story, I paused to consider the victim for once. Abbot Winai would undoubtedly have seen this as his karma. He’d probably visited the moment during meditation, walking on that path beside the flowers at that particular time when Mika Mikata passed by in her rental car. He probably knew before she burst through the hedge, before she forced him to don the hat. There had been no fear in his eyes and that would have been a terrible disappointment to the crazy Japanese, the woman who crafted death.
Sissi had posted the link to the members-only Orange Gallery on the Sangka Council’s Web site. It couldn’t be traced back to her. She knew the outrage would fuel its way to the police ministry and the case would explode in the media. Everyone was looking for something exciting to nudge the yuppy rebellion off the front pages. Somehow, Mika Mikata would be punished for her cruelty.
Our resort was quiet. Everyone had gone to bed. The table was littered with bottles and plates and topped by Gogo with sauce around her mouth. The cleanup could wait. I kick-started the motorcycle and rode into Pak Nam to deliver my exclusive. It was a ghost town. The light above the 7-Eleven bathed the street in puddles of red, green and orange. As I passed, I saw the cashier yawn into a magazine. There was another light from the upstairs window of a PVC pipe and pump store, one more at the intersection. It stretched the shadow of a threadbare cat into the shape of a giraffe. But the Internet shop was as dark as Nintendo Kong’s banana cellar, as quiet as Atlantis after the last of the Gorgon invaders had been destroyed.
I took off my shoe and rapped against the shutter. The sound echoed around the town like a lone Pamplona bull charging through the streets, but the only reaction was a faint “What do you want?” from above the café.
Seventeen
“I think we need not only to eliminate the toll-booth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, NASHUA, NH, AS QUOTED BY GAIL COLLINS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEBRUARY I, 2000
I got an early phone call from Dtor, my friend in Chiang Mai. The urban anarchists were still occupying our Government House. They’d been there for nine days already. They had their fold-up beach chairs and had diverted their magazine subscriptions to their new temporary address. They’d even rented a bank of Portaloos. They’d set up their futons and ordered in pizza while the police stood outside wondering why they had to make do with cold fried rice and a quick wee against the back wall. Anarchy was one of the fastest-growing middle-class hobbies. It had already overtaken Pilates and tai chi. I’d seen the photos: middle-aged women in stretch trousers and sensible tops giving the finger. Let’s see them try that in Burma. Anywhere else and you’d expect them to have been mowed down in a hail of machine-gun fire, beaten with batons, dragged screaming by their orthopedic shoes. This is our Government House, damn it. Our seat of power.
Who do they think they are? I didn’t vote for these people. But when you’ve got friends in high places, you know you aren’t scheduled for a police massacre. You take your best iPod with you without fear it might get bumped in a skirmish. You know the authorities won’t dare hurt you. You have power at your back, influence whose name dare not be spoken. So you settle down to your sudoku and send e-mails on your BlackBerry telling old schoolfriends that you’re on an insurgency at the moment and the reunion might have to be put off for a week or two.
But, of course, Pak Nam cared nothing of all that. It had squid. That was the extent of its concerns. The events at Wat Feuang Fa had blown through my life like a monsoon and when the squall died down, I was still standing, albeit windswept and crusted in salt. After all that had happened, I imagined that the busybodies might have crept back under their rocks and left Abbot Kem and Sister Bia to whatever it was they certainly weren’t doing. But a new complaint was lodged and a second IA abbot was on his way. For my own peace of mind, I needed to know what was motivating this monastic stubborn streak.
When I arrived at the temple, the nun was painting the other side of the wall and all the grass around it. She had a yarmulke of white at the back of her scalp.
“I see incarceration didn’t do a thing for your painting skills,” I said.
She turned to find me in very much the same position as when I’d first met her. She smiled and returned to her task.
“Some people never learn,” she said.
“So I hear.”
“Did Abbot Kem come back?”
“He didn’t ever leave. He has a cave up there, over the crest. He goes there sometimes to consider.”
That made sense. I couldn’t really imagine him charging off to Bangkok to rescue his maiden. The nun put the long buffalo-tail brush in the can. It fell out, splattering her ankles before coming to rest in a white puddle at her feet. She laughed and left it there.
“It has a life of its own,” she said. “How could I ever hope to tame it?”
She started off along the path, stopping briefly once to see if I was following. I hadn’t arrived with a plan, no questionnaire, no tactics. If she didn’t want to talk to me, I was prepared for that. I’d say goodbye and good luck and leave her alone to her secrets. But it was as if she’d been waiting for me. We sat on her porch and looked up at the sky. It was one of those days when you thought perhaps mother nature got her color ideas from looking at upmarket swimming pools.
“If only I could paint like that,” she said. Unexpectedly, she looked me straight in the eye. I felt a peculiar pang of love for her. “The young policeman told me my freedom is largely due to you.”
“There were a few of us, but I don’t mind taking credit on their behalf.”
She nodded, which I took to mean ‘thank you’.
“There was something in his heart,” she leaped in with no preview or warning. “He wasn’t good looking or strong, not even a great scholar. But there was something in his heart that I could feel. I was thirteen or fourteen, passing through all those obstacle courses that teenagers have to suffer, not understanding my place on the planet. I began to ask him questions about life. Not even, ‘Why are we here?’ questions. Just small curiosities. ‘Do you think trees feel pain?”
“Do ants wish they could be independent?’ That silly level. But he always had an answer that made me think, and it always made sense to me. He cheered me up.
“And, as I grew older, I began to depend on him and his answers. We were friends, of course, by then, but he became the type of friend that is a part of you. I can’t call what I felt for him ‘love’, not in a physical sense. It was more like a wonderful peace to have him in my life. Perhaps my spirit was in love with his. Then he entered the monkhood. I wasn’t at all surprised. I knew he needed guidance to help him make sense of all the feelings we’d discussed. When he left I felt so terribly empty, not of the person but of the message. I kn
ew that I was ready to search for myself. I was ready to accept a life of piety and modesty.
“We remained in contact through friends. We didn’t meet for many years but we were in one another’s hearts. I always knew that. And then, to my surprise, I learned that I had a tumor in my brain. It was called a GBM and it was inoperable. It wasn’t devastating news because we will all move along into the next life eventually, but I mentioned it in passing in a letter to Abbot Kem. To my surprise, he invited me here to spend my remaining time with an old friend. So I came. And I wait. It’s started.
You’ve already noticed my wonderful coordination. It won’t be long before my mind follows my painting skill. I won’t know which end of the brush to hold or what color is white.
“He and Abbot Winai spent many hours discussing me. I suppose I should have been flattered to have two such eminent men invest so much time in me. Their final decision, made on the day of the murder, was that I should stay. So, here I am.”
Two? Perhaps three large chunks of wood had become embedded in my chest. I could neither breathe nor cry. I had to saw a way through them with sighs before I could speak. Nothing profound fitted at that moment.
“What was the answer to the ant question?” I asked. “Do they want to be independent? It’s something I think about too.”
She laughed.
“He told me to be patient. Eventually I’d be an ant and I could answer the question for myself.”
The tears came slow as candle wax. I’d become a regular crybaby since my move from Chiang Mai. I was embarrassed for myself and in a hurry to leave. But before I could get away she opened the door to her hut and gestured me inside.
“I was hoping you could do me one more small favor,” she said.
In a cardboard box at the foot of her cot was a white bundle of fur, still as an ermine mitten. She put in her hand and lifted carefully. It was Sticky Rice, as limp as a hand puppet.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 27
