Bangkok Noir

Daylight Alex Kerr

All the witnesses agreed. The victim, an upcountry visitor to Bangkok of no particular importance, had died by stabbing on the BTS platform at three in the afternoon. He was thirty-eight years old, was named Kaew, had worked in a motorcycle repair shop in Khon Kaen and had died from stab wounds to his legs, abdomen and lungs. After a thorough autopsy had determined the cause of death, the family had collected the body and taken it back to Khon Kaen for cremation.

Including Kaew’s brother Nop, there had been about thirty witnesses on the crowded platform that day, of whom six had come forward to the police. Two young office ladies had been quick enough to actually record the incident on their cell phone video cameras, and the images were crystal clear because it had been a bright, sunny afternoon. They had all pinpointed the same person as the murderer, who had been duly questioned by the police.

At this point the rather thin file ended. An open and closed case, really. I put it down on the desk, looked out the window at Bangkok’s rows of white skyscrapers stretching off under the pale light of early morning and wondered why this would interest anyone. It must have been a very slow day in New York because my editor had somehow become aware of a murder on the Skytrain in Bangkok and asked me to look into it.

I live for the night. Bangkok, for me, begins at about four in the afternoon and only comes alive around midnight. So it was a grim moment when the phone rang at 5:00 a.m. with a sharp Brooklyn accent demanding that I get up immediately and submit a full report to New York within twelve hours.

Staying up all night and going to sleep when the sun rises is fine, but dawn is truly depressing when seen from the wrong end. A few cups of coffee later, the first rays of sunlight were striking the tops of the skyscrapers, and I was feeling a bit better. I reviewed the file again and then noticed the dissonant note that should have been obvious from the beginning: the suspect hadn’t been arrested. More strangely, his name was never mentioned at any point in any of the reports. A police cover-up? But if so, why, in a case involving someone of no particular importance? Or was it just a slip-up in the paperwork? Well, New York needed something fast, and I had just a day to find some angle on this case.

Time for breakfast. In the soi next to mine I used to enjoy walking past a charming but decrepit old wooden house intriguingly overgrown with huge vines. Then they tore it down and replaced it with a sleek white apartment building and opened an all-day breakfast café in an airy, glassy room on the first floor. All I had to do was to bear the morning heat for a few minutes as I slipped through the back streets to this little hideaway. There, surrounded by the French models who stay at the apartments in the upper floors, I could sit and surf the internet on the café’s Wi-Fi. If lucky, I’d find the missing pieces of this case online before finishing the last piece of toast.

But here I drew a blank. Usually murder cases get some mention in the news, often complete with lurid photos of gruesomely wounded corpses spread across the front page of daily newspapers like Thai Rath. In this case there was only silence. The sources and pages that should have covered the case just weren’t there. It was as if a hole had opened up in the internet and swallowed the whole incident. Well, the internet in Bangkok is like that. There are gaps, and you get used to it.

Curiosity piqued, I made my way back to my soi, now palpably a few degrees hotter, the tarmac simmering under the morning sun. I reentered my office with a sense of unease. Usually an hour or two on the internet is enough to satisfy New York. This time I had the foreboding that this case would actually involve some work.

First, some phone calls. The obvious person to start with would be Nop, Kaew’s brother. Nop had suffered minor cuts while trying to protect his brother, and after being treated in Bangkok had returned to Khon Kaen to recover.

I considered. Yes, one could catch a flight to Khon Kaen and get back in twelve hours. But I’m lazy. I’ve become a true Bangkokian in that I tend to feel that the civilized world falls away somewhere along the Bangna highway. There’s town, and there’s the long hot trek to a resort somewhere. Better to stay in my air-conditioned office. That’s what telephones are for.

It was easy enough to reach Nop. Although a Khon Kaen farmer, he too had a cell phone, making him just as accessible as someone in Bangkok. And then began one of those baffling conversations you can sometimes have in Thailand.

“Do you know who killed Kaew?

“Of course I know.”

“Who is it?”

“You should ask someone about that.”

“You mean the police? They’re not talking.”

“I guess they wouldn’t.”

“Is there anything you can tell me?”

“Just talk to the people you know. And then you’ll know.”

And with that, Nop hung up.

Nop was trying to tell me something, but who in the world would “people that I know” be? All I could think of were the people who had been at the scene. Best start with the six official witnesses. When I took another look at the files, the police had duly noted the names and contact numbers of the two girls who had taken the videos.

So an hour later I found myself eating lunch with two giggly office girls in one of those huge food courts on the top of a department store downtown. By now it was the noon-time rush hour, and bathed in the all-pervading glow of fluorescent lights, and surrounded by the coming and going of people clinking trays and plastic plates, it didn’t seem like a place to unravel a murder.

It took a while to get the girls, dressed smartly in red and green, to stop smiling and giggling out of embarrassment at being accosted by a foreigner. But finally they calmed down and pulled out their cell phones. Sure enough, the videos they’d taken were still there, and I could see the whole tragedy unfold, from the knife attack on Kaew to the moment when the police rushed up and apprehended the suspect. He looked to be about forty, was clean-cut, but neither in his clothing nor speech seemed to be anyone of importance. He was defiant. “I had to kill Kaew,” he declared. “There was no other choice.”

“What do you think he meant by that?” I asked. The girls wanted me to help decide which of their two cell phones had taken the best video. We watched again. The red-dress girl thought her Nokia version was clearer and the colors brighter, and I had to agree. But the green-dress girl insisted her Samsung sound quality had been better. Off they went in high spirits.

I still didn’t know the name of the suspect, or his motive, but one thing that came across was that this wasn’t a crime of passion. It was planned; it was serious. Maybe this was a gang killing. “I had to kill him” — that’s the sort of thing they say in gang vendettas. I wondered if Kaew was perhaps mixed up in drugs. There must have been lots of money, and maybe family pride was involved.

The girls had let me download their videos onto my computer. If I watched the videos closely enough, there might be some clue. So, seated in the vast food court, I looked again.

I noticed that there were faces in the crowd that I could recognize. I knew these people. Was that the lady who sells fried chicken at the corner? That man wearing a striped shirt — he lives on my street. We’ve talked in the café. As happens at a moment like this, my mind ran amok. I went from seeing one or two people that I thought I recognized to where suddenly every single person in those videos looked familiar. I couldn’t place them exactly, but I could swear that I’d seen them all.

Obviously, that was impossible. I decided I must be suffering from an overdose of morning light. Maybe it was the fluorescent glare and the tray-clinking crowds that were making me dizzy. Too many photons striking the retina at an early hour. It’s not healthy.

I stumbled out onto the open street, baking under the full blaze of the afternoon sun. Cars crawled sluggishly along clogged avenues, while busy pedestrians veered around me on the crumbling sidewalk. A vendor tried hard to sell me a wooden frog whose serrated back he stroked with a little stick, producing a croaking sound. I’ve seen that frog a hundred times, and it came as such a relief, a return to normalcy, that for a moment I even considered buying it. I was back to Bangkok as I knew it.

But no, something had changed. It had happened while I was watching the videos in the food court. I had the feeling I had become a cell phone recording an incident that had happened or was about to happen, but the color and sound quality were not as good as either a Nokia or a Samsung. The light was too bright, the sounds muffled. Bangkok hustled by, in all its chaos and color, but I was missing a key ingredient. People on the street knew something I didn’t. Maybe Kaew’s killing, although he was a person of no importance, really did have some importance.

It was time to call Evelyn Xu. She’s beautiful, goes to all the parties and is infinitely savvy about the city and full of good gossip. Why didn’t I think of her before? But first I needed to get off the street and sit down. It wasn’t long, of course, before I found a Starbucks, which was perfect because in its bland international chicness, it erased Bangkok for a moment. In here there were no gangs, no mysterious money, no Kaews or Nops. Just tall or grande.

“Evelyn, what do you know about the murder that happened last week on the Skytrain?” I asked. “You mean Kaew?” she replied. I was shocked that she was familiar with the name. How did Evelyn know about it? “Everyone knows about Kaew,” she said dismissively. In that case, did she know the name of the suspect? “Well, you hear stories. But it’s useless to even think about it,” she replied. “Anyway, there’s going to be the most incredible party this weekend. The top ten Japanese fashion brands are doing a joint event, spread over ten penthouses across the city. You really should go.”

“Wait a minute.” There seemed no sense to all this mystification if everyone already knew about Kaew. “Can’t you help me at all?” At this point Evelyn drew a breath and said simply: “Just talk to the people you know. And then you’ll know.”

My heart turned to ice. It was exactly what Nop had told me.

“Even if you don’t want to go round to all the penthouses,” she burbled, “come along with me and we can see the top three.”

“Okay, thanks, Evelyn.”

It was now three in the afternoon. The most dreadful time of day in Bangkok. In other parts of the world, the stroke of midnight would be the witching hour, the moment when ghastly things happen. Here, it’s 3:00 p.m.

Bangkok lore is replete with scary spirits, phii, who haunt the night alleys with disgusting entrails dangling, mouths foaming, tails flailing. But these phii have nothing on the great invisible Spirit of the Afternoon, who descends at 3:00 p.m., lowering her smoggy wings over the city, siphoning away the oxygen and disturbing people’s hearts and minds. A sluggish reptile that needs to bask in the sunlight for a while before she musters the energy to move, she wakes in the morning, but only goes hunting in earnest in the afternoon. Traffic grinds to a halt; clocks slow; business deals flounder; marriages grow stale; the heat reaches its unbearable apex. Taxi drivers talk too much and drive recklessly. People like Kaew die. Not a good time to go out in the sun.

Then I caught sight of Ajarn Jaa sitting in the corner. An influential academic, Jaa is one of those daunting Thai figures that one knows but, despite a welcoming smile, hesitates to become too familiar with. We bump into each other at the press club, and he always has something erudite to say. Jaa dwells in a knowledgeable heaven of his own. But I thought: “Here’s someone I know! Isn’t that what Nop and Evelyn have been telling me? ‘Talk to people you know.’ ”

I grabbed another iced cappuccino and sat down, uninvited, at Jaa’s table. He smiled welcomingly. After what seemed like an hour of pleasantries, I finally broached the question: “Ajarn, do you know anything about the murder that took place last week on the Skytrain of a man named Kaew?” This time I hit the jackpot.

Jaa was brimming with information. Yes, it was drugs, and money, lots of money, some of it counterfeit from North Korea. Jaa even knew about Kaew’s brother Nop, who was in deep as well, so it would be best to avoid him. In fact, Kaew’s whole family is involved in criminal networks. Jaa appeared to have made quite a study of the case. He regaled me with story after story, practically a genealogy of Kaew and his renegade clan from Khon Kaen. As he spoke, the pieces fell together, and I began to see the logic of the thing. Given a background like this, it’s surprising that someone hadn’t got Kaew even earlier. As for the drugs and money — well, in Bangkok that’s hardly news. It was a prosaic case after all.

“It’s been good chatting with you,” Jaa remarked, and granting me the most refined of wais, he whiffed out the Starbucks door and was gone. I stayed behind, delighted at my good fortune in getting some real information, until it hit me: Jaa never had given me the name of the killer.

Jaa had provided motive for a case of crime and vendetta. But after all that factual input, the identity of the man who stabbed Kaew stubbornly refused to reveal itself. The question that I started with in the morning remained unanswered. By this time it was 4:00 p.m., and although the day was still bright and hot, I had no choice but to exit Starbucks and brave the crowded Skytrain home. In Thai the words for “four o’clock” and “five o’clock” are sii mong yen and haa mong yen, “four drumbeats cool” and “five drumbeats cool,” meaning presumably the cool of the afternoon, but it never made sense to me. There’s nothing cool about a Bangkok afternoon, except the icy chill of the Skytrain itself, which makes the heat seem even more oppressive when you exit.

Steeped in thought, I walked down the steps from the Skytrain and then stopped in my tracks, the breath literally sucked from my lungs.

There she was. The lady selling fried chicken. She was a witness, and I’d seen her in the video. Now here was a case of asking someone that I know. I bought some fried chicken and thought about how I could bring this matter up. I’m well aware that directness is never the right way in Thailand, but I had to ask her. As she began chopping up the chicken, I blurted it out: “What did you see at the Skytrain last week?”

Through the oily steam billowing from her woks, I saw something in her eyes. Nop had been noncommittal. Evelyn had focused on her parties. The girls in red and green had seen the whole incident as a photo op. Ajarn Jaa had been caught up in the complexity of his theories. But this woman was afraid. In her eyes I saw a deep and implacable fear. “I wasn’t there,” she stammered. As she handed me a little plastic bag of chicken and rice, she whispered, “You’d better go home.”

There was clearly no point in pressing further. I thought: “I’d better take her words at face value. It’s time to go home.” In any case it was almost five o’clock, and soon New York would be on the phone demanding a response.

As I entered my building, I recognized someone seated in the lobby. It was the man in the striped shirt. He reintroduced himself as Khun Jaeng, a Thai banker. His condo was a few hundred meters down the soi. Could he come up to my apartment to talk?

He looked so proper, I felt it would be rude to refuse. You never know what trouble an act of rudeness could later cause you. So I invited him up.

We sat down in the living room, the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows and beaming through glasses of iced tea on the glass table between us. Pleasantries were exchanged. “I see you sometimes at the café, and since I live on the same soi, it’s a pity we haven’t had a chance to meet properly,” Khun Jaeng opened.

It was hard to focus on the conversation. Why was this person in my home? The light shining from behind Jaeng’s chair fell straight into my eyes, dazzling, disorienting. I had a report to file soon with very little real information to offer, and in New York they would not be amused.

Into my head flashed a scene from the old French novel Thaîs. A hermit has been meditating for decades in a desert hut, and every evening six black jackals come and sit outside. One night he has an unsettling dream, and when he awakes the next morning, he finds one little jackal sitting inside his tent. He knows then that outside forces have penetrated his magic ring.

The Phii of the Afternoon had breached my defenses. She had forced herself in and was shining light into a space usually shadowed.

The Phii of the Night drape themselves in outlandish costumes and go out and do a little hooting and grimacing, which scares the good people of the city as they walk dark byways. But after a few hours of haunting, these phii retire and you rarely see them again. The Phii of the Afternoon, on the other hand, once she’s entered your home, never goes away. I realized with finality that she would be waiting for me when I arose the next day. And the day after.

I wrenched myself back to Khun Jaeng, who was rambling on about our soi, the traffic, the breakfast menu at the café. Then finally: “I hear you’re investigating the incident on the Skytrain last week,” he remarked.

How on earth could he have known? But of course, he was a witness. He’s mixed up in this very intimately. The look in the eyes of the chicken lady still fresh in my mind, I proceeded with caution.

“The incident?”

“Yes, the killing of that man Kaew. We know you’re interested in that.”

“We?”

“Well, you know, we all saw it. We know what really happened. You never will.”

I glanced down at my watch. It was 5:00 p.m. Like a Zen adept who experiences enlightenment in the instant when his master asks where he had set his shoes, at the words “You never will,” I suddenly saw it. It was so simple.

Khun Jaeng was right.

I would never know. Looking back, this had been clear right at the beginning. An epiphany, it made sense of those Bangkok streets I’d walked through earlier that seemed to have mysteriously changed.

Mundane practicality reasserted itself. What could I tell New York? They wanted facts. With a jolt I realized that Khun Jaeng was still seated in the living room, looking at me expectantly with a glass of iced tea in his hand.

“You’re quite right,” I assured him. And like a murderer who’s keeping a body in the closet but hopes the police won’t open that particular panel, I slowly edged Khun Jaeng to the exit, hoping he would ask no more questions. Thankfully he didn’t. More wais.

Finally I was alone. The phone rang. It was New York. “About the Skytrain murder...” I began, but my editor had no time for that.

“A bomb went off in New Delhi. Who cares about the Bangkok Skytrain?”

“You asked me to look into it.”

“You know we only run that Thai stuff as a sop to people planning trips there. It’s time to focus on serious news. See if you can find a Southeast Asia angle to the India story. Otherwise, never mind. We’ll call you when something comes up.” And she was off the line.

It was six. The setting sun was blowing huge orange and purple balloons across the Bangkok skyline. New York didn’t need the story after all, and what a relief. The Bangkok night was coming on, and the Phii of the Afternoon was visibly losing energy. The snake had struck, was digesting her meal and would soon curl up and go to sleep. Leaving the night open and free.

I knew I would never again speak of Kaew to anybody. Which was fine because, after all, he was a person of no particular importance.