Bangkok Noir

1 Go East, Young Man

Anyone with a brain who followed this advice between, say, the end of WWII and the beginning of the 1990’s, is probably a millionaire by now, most will be in the ten million bracket, some are even captains of industry — but who was giving such advice? Answer: my Uncle Walter.

I only met him once when I was fourteen: long hair, sandals, beads, a deep fondness for trees and an extreme gentleness that could seem phony — oh, and a big marijuana habit, too. He took me to the Glastonbury music festival for a week and, by means of mystical argument, did his best to liberate my mind from its suburban prison. My mother had always spoken of her brother in ambiguous terms, sometimes as the black sheep of the family, at others, more wistfully, as the only one who found freedom; she never forgot to mention that he was a polyglot, like all the male members of her family, including me. In his endless travels he picked up languages like shells on a tropical beach. From my point of view it was a momentous meeting: there weren’t very many rebels left by the eighties.

Mum warned me not to be overly influenced by Walter, whose profound hope it was that he would die in the shadow of the Himalayas. The mountains granted his wish somewhat earlier than he had anticipated by means of untreated amoebic dysentery at the age of forty-two. His death left me at a forked path: should I follow the fear-based path of respectability, or take my chances with dharma? Or was there a way of hedging my bets?

I inherited his diary and his advice to go East, which I adapted to my own needs: after all, flower power had long been eclipsed by dough by the time I reached my twenties, and Uncle Walter was already pushing up poppies somewhere in the Hindu Kush. Nor did I expect to stay East; no, his diaries had seduced me, I had to visit those magic places, which he described with a gigantic literary gift he never exploited — then I was going to go West, to make real money.

Yeah, right. In the event I fell in love on my first trip to Bangkok (Thailand was second in Walter’s list of favorite places, after Ladakh). My true love’s family found me a lawyer who got me permanent residence: it was a lot easier in those days. So I married her, learned the language — everyone was astonished at how quickly I picked it up (I had the weirdest feeling that Walter was helping me out with the tones from beyond the grave) and eventually graduated from one of Bangkok’s finest universities with a first class law degree, all financed by my Thai in-laws, who then set me up in a tiny office off Silom and left me in no doubt that it was payback time. They even posted spies: any working hour I spent away from the office, unless on business, was reported to my wife who reported back to me in chiding tones.

And they sent me clients. You need to have practiced law to really have a feel for just how low, dirty, petty, vindictive, fascist, sociopathic, paranoid and sick the fabulously rich really are: every client they sent fit into that category. Oh yes, and there was another unspoken condition attached to the generosity they had shown me: certain cases I had to win, no matter what. Bribing became my principle forensic skill. I’ve been doing it for so long now, I could do it standing on my head. I can even do it without saying anything: I know all the tea ladies in all the government and corporate departments who are trusted to take brown paper envelops from one office to another, concealed under the dish cloths on their trolleys. There are a lot of wealthy tea ladies in Bangkok.

Now even my enemies say I’m more Thai than the Thais and if, in middle age, I am suffering from the self-disgust that lawyers like me need to feel in order to convince ourselves we’re still part of the human family — well, I have two trump cards left to save my soul. One is Uncle Walter — just recently I’ve taken to reading his diaries again, I even had them copied onto Microsoft Word so I can study them at work without the in-laws suspecting: they still post spies, I’m pretty sure my second secretary is in their pay. My other solace is Om.

Okay, you’ve guessed that Om is not my wife. True. Neither is she one of the over-paid whores at the over-priced brothel I have to visit every Saturday night with my brother-in-law Niran as part of our family male bonding ritual (it’s that or snort cocaine with the middle brother, or get drunk out of my mind with the youngest). Om is my innocence, Om is my soul. She came into my life mysteriously (she drove her trolley into mine at the big delly in the basement of the Paragon: a clear violation of aisle eitquette I thought, and said so in gutter slang; she stuck out her chest and tongue at the same time as putting her thumbs to her temples and wiggling her fingers: it was hilarious).

I don’t share Om with anyone. I even take precautions when I visit her in the condo I bought her, which happens to be one block away from my office. I go to her via the supermarket which has two exits onto two different streets... She thinks it’s funny the way I always arrive with unnecessary groceries. She loves nature, by the way, especially trees, and is gentle to a fault. I also supply her with marijuana that the cops give me for free: I’m far too good a customer for them to even think of charging. Not that she uses it much. In fact, I’m not sure she ever really wanted it — with her infallible intuition she saw that I needed to smoke a single joint with her as part of our Friday afternoon love-ins, when I shut out the world and everything that has happened to me since I first arrived. And if that’s not impressive, let me tell you: her intuition is not limited to minor bad habits: in bed she knew, from the beginning, exactly what I needed. Not many men have experienced that level of service, so allow me to report: it’s irresistible. Don’t look for it unless you want to be an emotional slave for life. Om knows all about Uncle Walter, of course; I had to tell her so she could be included in my secret life. She reads his work as part of her English language studies.

2

Om comes (she says) from a very small village on the Cambodian border where everyone is tattooed and speaks Khmer as a first language. Her tattoos are in an ancient Khmer script and, I do believe, are faithful reproductions of still more ancient Hindu spells and magical incantations that can be traced back to the Arians and the Vedas. When I first slept with her she watched the expression on my face when I found the tattoo on her upper left thigh about two centimeters from the entrance to her vagina. I still have no idea what it says and I don’t know why I gulped when I saw it. How can a single syllable in an alien script make anyone gulp? It had an effect though. After the first time I saw it, I became very horny — outrageously so for a man of my age. Since then the tattoos have increased. At the time of writing she owns another at the small of her back, one on her left shoulder and one more about half an inch below her navel. So far as I know they are all ancient Khmer script and represent Bronze Age Brahmin magic.

There’s another curious thing about Om: she loves the shrine to Mae Nak not far from On Nut Skytrain station on the Phrakanong canal. I can’t remember how many times I’ve gone there with her. She always buys candles and incense and spends about fifteen minutes in profound meditation whenever she visits. You know the story of Mae Nak of course? That brave and noble Thai wife for whom death was no obstacle: she continued to take great care of her husband and family even as a ghost. For my money Mae Nak deserves the title as patron saint of Bangkok, considering how popular she is; there’s always a crowd of women at her shrine when Om and I visit. Everyone remembers the punch line: one day while the ghost Mae Nak was preparing nam phrik in front of her husband on the floor of their wood house, she dropped a lime through a gap in the floor boards. The lime landed in the cellar below and, without a thought, Mae Nak effortlessly extended her arm to a length of twenty feet to retrieve it. Her flesh-and-blood husband saw, realised he’d been living with a ghost and freaked.

Okay, I’m going to make a confession here: on the morning of the day Om and I first made love together Om took me to Mae Nak’s shrine and as we were both kneeling she took my left hand and pressed it on her upper left thigh. I wondered what she was doing; then, later that day, when I saw her naked I realised she had pressed my hand on her tattoo. I bought her condo a week later, because I knew even at that stage I could not survive without her.

Now, so far nothing I’ve related can be said to be totally out of the ordinary; a little eccentric, perhaps, with plenty of Oriental exoticum, but nothing to which you wouldn’t lend credence, right? So here’s the stretcher: last Friday afternoon when I visited I saw she had been busy redecorating the condo. Well, maybe redecorating is an extravagant word for the half hour she must have spent with a felt tip pen and a spray gun. They were everywhere. What were? The tattoos, of course. The one on her thigh was reproduced above the front door and again on the bedroom door. The others, those on her back, shoulder and belly, appeared in either black or red at various places all over the flat. Then there were the sculptures: carefully carved and polished pieces of blackwood all about twelve inches in length, all on wrought iron stands, all highly artistic three-dimensional reproductions of the tattoo on her thigh, placed at strategic positions near doors and windows.

Yes, I was taken aback, but not overly so. If she had been practicing black magic on me, I was pretty satisfied with the result so far — I don’t want to sound mean spirited, but compared with the sex life I’d had at home for the past decades... So I made no objection and even confessed that simply seeing that single ancient Khmer syllable (whatever it meant) in black over the front door was giving me a hard-on. But the magical inscriptions were only a tiny part of the shock to my sense of reality that day. Instead of taking me straight to the bedroom, as she usually did, Om gave me a special excited smile and showed me where she’d reached in Uncle Walter’s diary, which she was reading on her laptop. She had taken the trouble of inserting an electronic book mark, so that as soon as she had started Word, we were taken to a paragraph in Walter’s diary which read:

Now, the problem was that such a passage did not appear in Walter’s diary, although it is a pretty good imitation of his style. I ought to have known, for at certain times in my life I’d spent whole years reading him, I knew his masterpiece by heart, and such a passage did not appear in it. Rather than argue with her, or allow myself to be distracted in any other way from the jolt to the crotch that her redecoration had delivered the moment I entered the flat, I simply shook my head and forced a smile. After all, I had only to return to my office later to check with the handwritten original, which I kept in the safe there.

Om’s magic worked even better than usual that day: five times, squeezed into the couple of hours I’d allowed myself for lunch. Naturally, as soon as I’d showered and kissed my amour goodbye, I rushed back to the office to retrieve Walter’s script. It is in the form of school exercise books of various gaudy colours, more than one hundred in all. I knew, 10 Gone East roughly, the dates when he was in Bangkok, so it was not difficult to find the book, and then the page, which Om had been reading on her laptop. Now the green balls really started to run down my legs: this is what I found in Walter’s inimitable spidery script:

A cold sweat broke out all over my body. I knew, for certain, that passage had not been in the original. But I was looking at the original, and there it was. No question but that the safe was inviolable: a floor-to-ceiling Chubb with high tech extras, it was ridiculous to think Om or anyone working for her could have broken into it. Anyway, there was no sign the script had been tampered with, and only a counterfeiter of genius could have forged Walter’s handwriting and even then how would they have inserted such a paragraph in an old traveler’s journal where every last space was used up?

I was scared. Very very scared.

3

Fear was not my only reaction, however. I was also thrilled, intrigued, fascinated — and it would be coy not to admit to a certain hope that something inexplicable to law and science was happening to me. I was not wrong. No sooner had I put Walter’s journal back in the Chubb and locked it, than my first secretary came into my room to say that a new client was waiting to see me. This also was anomalous. All my clients came through my wife’s family connections and always made contact with my second secretary, who did nothing except network with my in-laws. My first secretary was trained in law and was brilliant at all she did but could not network to save her life. When I exchanged a glance with her she shrugged and jerked a chin at the waiting area. I nodded. She left the room to return a few seconds later with a tall, slim, wiry Southeast Asian man in his sixties with long gray hair in a pony tail, a wispy gray beard and piercing eyes. I understood immediately that he was a type one comes across from time to time in Asia: somehow, perhaps through some mystic or martial discipline, he had retained an undeniable vigor, as if the virility of youth still empowered his hard body. When I offered him a chair, he shook his head. Instead he came up to the desk, looked down to study me with intense curiosity for a moment, then said in Thai with a thick Khmer accent: “Your wife is dying. Go home now.”

I raised my eyes slowly until they looked into his, which were blazing black. While we were mesmerizing each other, I realized he had started to undo the top buttons of his shirt. He continued until he had undone each one all the way down to his waist band. When he pulled his shirt open, I began to understand. His flesh was a mass of black tattoos, amongst which I had no difficulty in discerning those forms and shapes that I had seen earlier that afternoon at Om’s condo: the same, of course, as those on her body.

Naturally, I called my driver and rushed out of the office to the pick-up area outside the building. My car was a high-end Lexus with tinted windows; when we reached the walled compound, where my in-laws had built a set of fine detached houses slap bang in the middle of downtown Bangkok, the great gates opened automatically, then closed with a clank behind us. For more than twenty-five years I had loathed that clank, so similar, in my mind, to the clank of prison gates.

As soon as the driver stopped the car I dashed into our house, ignored the maid who stood in the middle of the lounge looking depressed, knocked softly on my wife’s bedroom door and waited for her low, soft, pathetic “Come in.”

If I’ve said almost nothing about my wife so far it is for one simple reason: guilt. Lalita — always shortened to Lali — had never done me any harm and I really did love her once: why else would I have made so much effort to please her family? Lali, though, was one of those Asian women who are simply not sensual. We had produced no children and, except for the first months of marriage, hardly made love more than once in a blue moon to convince each other we were still an item. Soon after that Lali lost interest in love making altogether, then, a decade later, in the world. She has spent most of her middle age in her bedroom where childhood friends and her favorite aunt visit her. Whenever we meet we both feel a great sadness that things have worked out this way. I am proud to report that each of us has found the strength not to blame the other: sometimes life simply is like that. The thought, therefore, that I may have inadvertently caused her death by the vilest form of Khmer sorcery through taking Om as a mia noi, was dreadful to me beyond words. Believe it or not I began to resolve, at that moment, to drop Om. Passionate as I was about her, I could not countenance, or live with, the murder of Lali by witchcraft.

I was in quite a state, in other words, which was made worse by the doctor who was just leaving. He caught me at the door and said in a tone which I found accusatory: “Massive cancerous growth behind the stomach, too deep to operate...”

“How long does she have?”

“About a week, if that.”

I closed — almost slammed — the door behind him and went to Lali who lay on her bed watching me. I pulled up a chair, took her hand, pressed it to my lips and said: “I’m so, so sorry. So very very sorry,” and burst into tears.

She caressed my head with her hand. “Don’t worry, it’s all going to be alright.”

“How can you say that?” I said, bawling.

She smiled and said: “If you stop making a noise I’ll tell you.”

4

“This is not an easy question for me to ask,” Lali said in a weak voice, her head sunk into the pillow, locking eyes with me for a moment, then looking away. “Tell me the truth, have you ever felt that you were set up by me and my family?”

“Set up?” I scratched my jaw.

“Don’t lie. It’s way too late for that.”

I thought about it. “By you, no. You’re far too innocent. By your family — maybe, in an opportunistic way. After they got to know me they realised they were going to have the lawyer they always wanted: clever, respected, street wise and, being a farang, entirely dependent on them for clients and funding. I have to admit, they were right to think they needed one. If not for me everyone of your male relations would be on death row or serving life sentences.”

She took away the hand that had been holding one of mine and her features tensed to such a degree I feared she was going to have a seizure. “You’re wrong, I’m afraid. Quite wrong. I am as much a product of these people as my three brothers. How could I not be? I was brainwashed from birth. They sent me out to find a farang like you whom they could manipulate, and since I was their zombie, their robot-like all good little upper class gangster girls — I did as I was told. This is the way the world is, was their message, these are the kind of things you have to do to survive. And: look at the money we’ve spent on you, didn’t you realise it would be payback time one day?Everyone else is earning their keep. What did I know? I’d never had an independent thought in my life. If you remember, I even faked an interest in sex at first.”

“Lali,” I said, “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

She ignored me. “But when I saw how basically noble you were, and how you had that peculiar British integrity — which my charming family sees as stupidity — that forced you to carry on with what you had started, even if you had a frigid wife and the mob for in-laws, I started to feel terrible. Really terrible. So terrible I could no longer live a normal life. You see, in my own frigid way I had finally fallen in love with you, but being a psychic nonentity I had no libido. I think I might have developed sexually, if I hadn’t been so depressed about it all. It’s been cowardice and self-disgust that’s kept me pinned to this bed — this damned room — all these years. If I’d had one atom of courage I would have told you to pack our bags and take us to the Himalayas — I dreamed of living in a cave with you in a state of total poverty.” She sighed. “But I waited too long. Middle age caught up with me. It was too late.”

“Lali, you’re killing me with this,” I said.

She put a hand out for me to hold. “But not to worry, this is Thailand. There is always a way around such things.”

I frowned. Whatever could she mean?

She beckoned me to come closer. “The Mae Nak shrine — your uncle Walter’s mysticism — they sowed seeds in my mind, but there was nothing I could do until Bunthan came to see me.”

“Who?”

“The Khmer man who came to your office today. I sent for him through my Aunt Nit, whose husband is also from Cambodia. Bunthan is a shaman of the old Khmer school that has its roots in ancient Brahmin sorcery.” She had to pause for breath. I could see her heroic struggle with weakness and nausea and felt worse than ever. She continued: “He has been teaching and training me for ten years. I wanted to tell you immediately but he wouldn’t let me. He reminded me of how fatal weakness and impatience can be — look what misery those faults had brought me already.”

“Teaching and training you in what?”

For a long moment she did not answer. Indeed, she seemed already to inhabit a different world. “Advanced techniques in cheating death,” she said at last in a whipser.

“But you’re dying — the doctor said so?”

“Yes,” she said with a grave nod, “but thanks to Bunthan I’m going to cheat. We are going to be saved by ancient magic, my love, working through me. Indeed, you could almost say that in your case you have already been saved. Just promise me one thing — that you’ll play the game and won’t freak out like Mae Nak’s husband?”

“How can I promise anything when I have no idea what you’re talking about? I’m sorry, you have to tell me more.”

Lali sighed, then beckoned me to come close to her mouth. I could see in her face all the suffering of the decades, and the toll her disease was taking. Her voice shook when she said: “All these years I’ve spent mostly in bed — immobile, you see, more or less dead.”

“So?”

“He showed me how to...”

“How to what?”

She raised her head with great effort to say: “Project the etheric body, also known as the ghost body. It can be done, you know, consciousness can live anywhere, it can even create its own vehicle.” Then she collapsed back onto the pillow and closed her eyes.

“No,” I said, “you can’t leave it at that.” I shook her. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on. What did you do to Uncle Walter’s diary?”

She smiled very faintly. “Bunthan said it had to be done that way. It’s part of the architecture of your mind that your Uncle Walter has to be on your side. After all, he’s the one who brought you to Thailand in the first place, he’s your real life guru. You needed at least a hint from him. I read the diary to Bunthan, who is illiterate in everything except ancient Khmer, and even then he can only read magical incantations. He says your Uncle Walter was very advanced, but there was a paragraph missing from the script, which Walter deliberately left out because you weren’t ready, but now had to be replaced.”

I stared at her with aggressive incomprehension until, with great effort, she pushed me away, then started to drag the sheet off of her. She was wearing a cotton dressing gown, which she pulled up until her pubic hair was exposed. I breathed in sharply: there was that same tattoo about two centimeters from her vagina, identical in every way to the one Om also wore in the same place. I needed no further prodding. I pulled open her dressing gown and made her sit up. Sure enough: the same tattoos as Om in identical positions on her shoulder, belly and lower back.

She was quite exhausted and could hardly manage the last words she ever said to me: “I’m going to make it up to you. What you’ve seen so far is only the beginning.”

She died that same night.

5

I typed the foregoing notes, Reader, in a state of great agitation the day after Lali died. On reflection they appear to me as a crude attempt at exorcism, and I trust you will forgive a certain hysteria inherent in the account, which is, I can assure you, nevertheless true in every particular. Now, six months have passed and everything has changed.

I waited a decent length of time before moving Om into the compound. The ex-in-laws didn’t like it, but there was nothing they could do. They knew something occult was going on, over which they had no control — and in any case, there’s no way they can survive without me. Just to be on the safe side, I also moved Bunthan into the compound, because he terrifies them. In other words, Lali’s death has made me prince of the fort, a veritable boss or jao poh, who runs the show. I am finally free and intend to celebrate by taking Om on an extended vacation to the Himalayas: we’ll be spending quite some time in Ladakh. I can’t tell you how excited she is.

Life has improved in other ways, too. I’ll give an example. Om and I have developed our social life to the point where we’ve learned to enjoy even the stuffiest side of my profession. When we went to a Law Society dinner last week they sat us more than ten places away from each other on opposite sides of the infinite table. Both of us were stuck with brainnumbing bores on either side, but it didn’t bother us at all. Just as the high court judge on my right was starting into an insufferable diatribe against the latest criminal law amendment statute, I felt a friendly tug at my crotch, followed by the unzipping of my pants by petite expert hands and a long, slow, humorous caressing of my member. True, Om was sitting more than thirty feet away, but distance is no problem for one of her reach. Of course, I don’t call her Om anymore when we’re alone. I call her by the name of the master who is projecting her: Lali.

John Burdett was brought up in North London and attended Warwick University where he read English and American Literature. This left him largely unemployable until he re-trained as a barrister and went to work in Hong Kong. He made enough money there to retire early to write novels. To date he has published six novels, including the best selling Bangkok series: Bangkok 8; Bangkok Tattoo; Bangkok Haunts and The Godfather of Kathmandu.