“Gogo’s talking about getting engaged.”
“Wow. Now that’s serious.”
Actually, talking about getting engaged was just like talking about world peace. Much easier than actually doing it.
“So tell me about him,” I said.
“No, Jimm. I wish I could. But this is a small town. I know what it’s like here. I don’t want everyone knowing my business. Especially if it doesn’t work out.”
Romance had steadied Da’s hand. I hardly felt the shot. We talked about Dr. Somluk, and I told her all the news I’d gathered from my meeting with Dr. June and the conference.
“Any idea why she would have singled out the pediatrician from Bangkok at the conference?” I asked.
“Do you know what subject she was speaking on?”
“Something about breasts being a figment of our imagination, which in my case…”
“Ah, well. That’s why,” said Da. “Breastfeeding was one of the doctor’s pet subjects. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Bangkok woman was encouraging mothers to shift over to formula.”
“See? I still don’t get this. If formula’s as healthy as they say, why shouldn’t they switch?”
“Right. Dr. Somluk’s argument was that formula’s a poor substitute for breastfeeding, but the company promotes it as a healthy alternative. It’s cleaner, they say. Easier to use. It turns your kid into some preschool genius. She agreed there were times it was necessary if the mother can’t breastfeed for any reason, but basically it’s only healthy in the same way that vitamins are healthy. No doctor’s going to recommend people give up food and live on vitamins.”
“So you’re saying that mothers aren’t using formula as a supplement.”
“We’re in the countryside. Mums see the healthy chubby babies on TV, and they start thinking they’ve done their babies wrong by giving them breast milk. Formula babies do get fat faster, but big isn’t necessarily a positive thing. The doctor said that these babies are more likely to become obese when they get older. But the companies convince mothers that suckling is old-fashioned. You never see the high society divas on TV giving babies the nipple. Mothers figure the more formula they give, the more healthy, happy and smart their babies will be. So they spend money they haven’t got on the products. Then, when the money runs out, they water down the formula.”
“And babies are getting sick?”
“The doctor had all the figures. She said that twenty-something percent of babies that didn’t get breastfed between one and twelve months were toast. She might have phrased that a different way, mind you. No antibodies in formula, you see, so no natural ability to fight diseases. She said that worldwide, optimal breastfeeding up to two years of age would prevent over a million deaths a year. Then there were the stats on child deaths in the region due to mothers confusing the packaging on formula and coffee creamer.”
“And where does she keep her figures?”
“On her laptop. In her room, with her stuff.”
“She left it behind?”
“She left everything. I got another text yesterday saying she’d come by to pick it up later.”
“She texted you?”
“Telling me not to worry about her. That’s the third time.”
“That’s weird. She can text, but she can’t talk? Can I look at her things?”
“OK.”
We walked to a low building with a corrugated roof behind the main complex. Dr. Somluk’s room was closed and padlocked.
“Has anyone been here since she left?” I asked.
“Only the policeman, as far as I know.”
“Tall? Gay?”
“That’s the one. The way he was dressed, I didn’t believe he was a policeman. I asked him to show me some ID. He whipped out his Thai Savings Bank ATM card.”
“And that got him into this room?”
“He said he was a friend of yours.”
“I’ll have to get him to stop doing that.”
Da found the room key on a ring of twenty or so similar keys and opened the padlock. The room was sparse and tiny. There was one small bed and a foldable plastic closet with a zip door. In my mind there were two types of doctors: those who died of malaria working for the natives and those that drove Mercedes and had air-conditioned toilets. This was a jungle doctor. I unzipped the closet. Her clothes were piled in two neat stacks. Hanging from loops were two white coats and a funeral dress. Below were two pairs of shoes, one black, one white, a small selection of books and a laptop. I took out the books and the computer, which didn’t seem to have a lead. I hoped there’d be enough power in the battery to show me what was stored there. I turned it on and thumbed through the books while I was waiting. They were all medical apart from one which was titled Advertising Practices in the Twenty-first Century.
“This is all she has?” I asked.
“I guess.”
“No TV. What did she do in the evenings?”
“I don’t know. I went back to my room in the village as soon as the clinic closed. There’s a TV in the main building. She might have watched that, although I never saw the lights on over there if I passed by at night. She stayed here all the time.”
“Anyone living in the other rooms?”
“No. Just her.”
“Did you ever see her using this laptop?”
“Yeah. All the time. She had a lot of downtime.”
“Do you recall seeing a little rectangular gadget sticking out of the side of it?”
“Do you mean a dongle?”
Once Sissi had taught me how to use a dongle, I thought it would be very cool to spread the word to the locals. “White man in big city, he make big magic. Small gadget put in computer. Pick up cell-phone signal.” But they all reacted with “You mean a dongle?” as if I were the last person to have heard of one. And they’d add insult to injury by saying, “We had one last year, but we upgraded to MiFi.”
“Yeah, a dongle,” I said.
“She was online, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Thanks.”
The computer sang its annoying, “New York, New York” ditty, and the screen came to life. I went digging. The desktop had no files saved for easy reference. “My documents” was empty. C drive was empty. The machine might as well have been straight from the shop.
“It’s been wiped,” I said.
“I know,” said Da, who sat on the bed behind me looking over my shoulder.
“How do you know?”
“Your policeman checked it. In fact, he asked all the same questions you just did.”
“Well, thanks for that information. What else did he ask?”
“If anyone else had a key to this room.”
“And you said…?”
“Just me and Dr. Somluk. And he said somebody could easily have taken her key when she was abducted and come here in the dead of night and removed any evidence she had stored away.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“He asked if she had an external hard drive or access to another computer, and I said I’d seen her on the clinic’s desktop computer from time to time.”
“You know you could have saved us a trip to this room if you’d told me all this in the beginning.”
“Sorry.”
“And I’m assuming you went to the clinic’s computer, and he turned it on and that was empty too.”
“Right.”
“And he went home.”
“No, I think he said he was heading back to the bar.”
“One more honest policeman. I suppose I’d better stay faithful to the joint investigation and take a look at that computer too.”
We returned to the surgery, where a very large mother was sitting patiently beside a red-welted child. I counted some thirty stings on him.
“Why isn’t he crying?” I asked the mother.
“Bai dteui,” she said. It was a local version of betel leaves that slowed down reaction time and numbed the senses.
“Horne
ts?” Da asked. The mother nodded.
“He was up a tree and knocked it down by accident,” she said. “He would of got bitten worse if he hadn’t fell out the tree.”
“How did you get here?” said Da, opening the medicine cabinet.
“Motorcycle.”
“OK. I’m allowed to give him an oral dose of antihistamine,” said Da. “Then we rush him down to the bike, and you ride as fast as you can to Pak Nam hospital. Take him straight into Emergency.”
“All right,” said the mother, who had apparently chewed a few leaves herself.
After the shot, Da and the mother raced the boy downstairs. I turned on the clinic computer and found nothing but government training programs and reference material. It was a nice machine, a Dell Optiplex; Thailand, with its ex-communications tsar PM, was big at dropping lumps of IT here and there for show without explaining how they might be best utilized. It was not online and apparently never had been, which posed an interesting question. If Dr. Somluk had her own computer and was online, why would she bother with the desktop at all? And the answer was pretty damned obvious.
Nurse Da returned from her race, shaking her head.
“See?” she said. “I could have fixed that myself. We’ve got all the right drugs here, but I’m just a nurse. There are restrictions on what I’m allowed to do, which include saving a patient’s life. I’ve got a cupboard full of adrenaline up here that would work instantaneously. But I’d be fired if I gave him a shot. That’s why we have to have a doctor here. Then, if she screws up and the patient dies, the clinic has insurance cover. They might as well just employ a traffic cop to redirect emergencies from here to Pak Nam.”
“Feeling better now?”
“Yeah. I’m probably just worked up because Gogo got to see me flustered.”
“Gogo was here?”
“He just arrived downstairs.”
“I missed Gogo? Damn.”
“He dropped by to remind me of our date tonight. I invited him up to meet a real newspaper reporter, but he couldn’t stop. He said to say hello.”
“I’ve probably seen him around. What does he look like?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“One hint.”
“He’s big. More than twice my weight. Eighty-five kilos. That’s all I’m telling you.”
I had to smile at the image of skinny Da walking around with her fat Thai boyfriend. Still, whatever makes a girl happy. But that led my mind to the looks I got when I walked into the restaurant with Conrad. They were probably thinking, “There’s no accounting for taste.”
“So, anyway. Do you have a music system here?” I asked.
“What?”
“Somewhere you can rest after your busy day and listen to music, read magazines?”
“We’ve got a staff room.”
“Lead me there.”
We walked to the end of the corridor to a room labeled STAFF RELAXATION CENTER. It was furnished with comfortable chairs, a carpet of all things, and a flat-screen TV. The whole center was typical of big-country politics on small-town pockets. Buy things. Build things. Re-lay perfectly good roads. But take a lot of pictures. Political advancement was about buying favors, and my modern nation’s elders had decided country people were easily swayed by the sight of shiny beads. You couldn’t take photos of human development so it took a backseat. Nurse Da had a shiny white health center all to herself with a glass cabinet, a DVD player, and a stack of music and movies.
I got to my knees, opened the smoked glass doors of the cabinet, and thumbed through the discs. The one I was looking for was at the back. There was nothing written on it.
“Did Lieutenant Chompu get this far?” I asked, gloating slightly and waving the unmarked CD.
“No. Looks like you win,” said Da.
We returned to the office, put the CD in the computer drawer, and I found it on the menu. There was one Word folder on it. When I clicked it, some thirty or forty Word files came up with names like Letter One to Medley. Reply to Letter Four from Medley. The first letter was dated April. That would have been two months before Dr. Somluk first started working at the Maprao clinic. When she was still at the Regional Clinic Allocations Department with Dr. June. I opened that first letter to Medley, and Da leaned over my shoulder to read it.
To Medley Regional Office, Bangkok
Dear Sirs,
My name is Dr. Somluk Shinabut and I am working at the Chumphon Regional Clinic Allocations Department based at the Lang Suan hospital in the south of Thailand. I have recently become aware, through my work here, that your rather forceful advertising campaigns on our national television stations and in the popular press are having a negating effect on our rural efforts to encourage women to provide breast milk for their infants.
I am enthusiastic about the use of your product (budget permitting) when, due to extreme conditions, a woman is unable to breastfeed. But even using your product as a supplement interferes with the natural process of suckling. Your company continues to promote formula as a supplement because you know that formula babies stop taking mother’s milk and the supply dries up sooner as a result. I am concerned that an increasing number of mothers are getting the wrong message from your ambiguous advertisements—that they should abandon breastfeeding in order to give their babies a better chance to be strong and healthy. You make astounding claims that formula babies have a higher IQ, are stronger, and have better digestion and immune systems. As you know, this is clearly not the case.
I also remind you that your formula needs to be mixed with water, and many rural communities still rely on well- or river-water and live in unhygienic conditions. This is clearly far more dangerous for babies than taking mother’s milk regularly.
In 1981 your company signed the International Code on the Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes, which was drafted to protect the culture of breastfeeding by controlling the marketing of formula products throughout the world. You are clearly not operating under the spirit of that agreement. In fact, you seem to have refocused your efforts on Third World countries, where you believe health workers are easier to manipulate. Well, health workers in Thailand are neither gullible nor stupid, and we will not allow you to endanger the health of our children in your quest for higher profits.
Sincerely
Dr. Somluk Shinabut
I scrolled down to find a reasonable English translation of the same letter addressed to Medley’s head office in Switzerland.
“Wow,” said Da. “She was…? Wow. And she sent that to Europe?”
“Looks like it.”
“She’s got balls.”
“She certainly has. And I doubt whether this stock reply from the Bangkok office shrank those danglers even the slightest.”
To Dr. Somluk Shinabut
Dear Doctor,
We at Medley always appreciate comments and opinions from health professionals in the field. We may be a multinational corporation, but one valuable suggestion from a doctor in even the smallest village in a developing country has the power to change an entire national policy.
We have noted your comments, and our Public Relations department is, at this very moment, making inquiries into the practices in your region and will pursue every effort to address any misunderstandings or misrepresentations.
As a result of this, we trust that matters will be resolved to your satisfaction in the very near future.
Yours sincerely
Medley Customer Relations Department, Bangkok.
“It was nice that they wrote back,” said Da.
“Da, are you kidding? They didn’t write back. They just cut and pasted Dr. Somluk’s name and the date on their form letter and returned it. I doubt anyone even bothered to read it. And Europe would leave these regional hiccups for their regional office to take care of. It was a bullshit response and Somluk knew it.”
I opened a later correspondence and scanned through it.
“Huh! And so we get to letter number thirteen,”
I said. “She’s already left the regional office and been transferred down here to Maprao. And poor old Dr. Somluk knows that she still hasn’t been referred to an actual person who gives a monkey’s bum. She knows she can discard the politeness and be reckless. Perhaps then someone might take notice.”
I smiled as I imagined her typing this.
Dear Idiots at Medley,
Thank you for not replying in person to any of my letters, which have articulated why children in my region have been dying unnecessarily as a result of your illegal and irresponsible misrepresentation of facts. I thought you might enjoy one more anecdote from an insignificant rural doctor. Now that I’m working directly in the field, I see even more clearly how evil you are.
In the same aisle as your life-giving, godforsaken formula are your own dairy creamers, coffee whiteners with the same grinning teddy bear on the packet. The same packaging. But so much cheaper than formula, and such a better option. And congratulations. Word is out that children given coffee creamer from an early age are fatter and jollier than kids that aren’t. I even saw a TV spot from a famous actress who held up her bloated baby to the camera. And I see them here in the villages. They really are round and chubby, and every one of them is undernourished and suffering from anemia.
You are so clever. You’re getting away with murder. But I’m not going to rest until I let the world know how despicable you are. I’ll stop you, I swear I will. I have become involved with a number of online organizations that already know what you’re doing. My experiences have been posted there. Soon everyone will know. Remember this name. You’ll be hearing a lot of it.
Dr. Somluk Shinabut
“She’s starting to sound a bit…”
“Fanatical?”
“Yes,” said Da. “Paranoid, even.”
“Paranoid doesn’t always mean wrong,” I said, although that was probably an oxymoron.
“You’d have dealings with local health workers,” I said. “What do they say about all this?”
“They’re all really big on formula.”
“You think this is just another one of your Dr. Somluk’s mental symptoms?”
Da thought about it for a while.
“No. I don’t know,” she said. “She’s a troubled woman for sure, but she has a good heart. Ooh.”
The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Page 14
