Bangkok Tattoo

13

On the flight to the deep South I sit next to two young sex tourists who are chuckling over a familiar chestnut:

“So I paid her bar fine and took her back to my room for an all-night, and when I went to use the bathroom in the morning, canyabelieveit, she’s actually been squatting on the seat-there are foot marks all over it.”

This particular story always annoys me. I think it does illustrate the cultural gap though, not because the girls are used to squatting, but because Westerners find it so important and shocking. I guess the toilet is right at the center of the farang mind, just as Buddha is with us, no? I’m afraid I could not resist an intervention.

“Recent research shows that people who squat rarely if ever suffer from cancer of the colon,” I tell the young fellow next to me (headscarf, nose stud, three-quarter walking shorts, and T-shirt).

A quizzical look. “That right?”

“Yes, soon you’ll all be squatting over there too. It’ll take a while to catch on, there’ll be squat-ins, everyone will have to go to classes, there’ll be how-to best-sellers with illustrations, talk-show hosts will demonstrate how it’s done, missionaries will be dispatched to other countries.”

“Huh?”

Isn’t universal education a wonderful thing? I turn away to stare out the window at weightless white puffs, still irritated, until I remember the venerable Monsieur Truffaut, who hired my mother for a few months in Paris when I was young. There was a squatters’ toilet even in his cinquième arrondissement apartment. My mother always respected him-and the French-for that. Actually, my mother and I both prefer to squat. Neither of us has ever suffered any kind of bowel disorder in our lives, by the way, farang.

In Hat Yai I catch a cab to the railway station.

Train: I think we must have bought our rolling stock from the British in the heyday of empire; I imagine an Edwardian in worsted wool somewhere in the English Midlands calculating that if he left out the upholstery, he could fit in one more native per seat. After half an hour the slats have imprinted themselves on my bum, which I am sure must resemble a wicket.

Scenery: Small black violin-shaped birds sing in unison on telephone wires, a silver-gray buffalo with long horns blunders across a field, naked kids play in a stream, the grass is the same green as a card table, in flooded fields the first frail shoots of this year’s second rice harvest; everything distorts with heat. You could say the landscape changes dramatically from Hat Yai on south, though not for any reason of geography. All of a sudden the women working the fields are wearing Islamic headscarves and long skirts. Many are in black from head to foot. It is not in the nature of our women to cover their faces or affect prudishness, but the statement is unambiguous: this is another country. The men, too, wear Islamic headgear, either the skullcaps that so resemble those of their Hebrew brothers, or flowerpot-shaped things that cling to the sides of their heads. It is early evening, just before sunset, and the cries of invisible muezzins calling the faithful to invisible country mosques haunt the gathering dusk. Fear settles on my shoulder for a long haul. Anything can happen down here.

It’s dark by the time the train reaches Songai Kolok, and my instinct is to check the town out first, before contacting Mustafa.

It looks as if every second building on the main street is a form of rentable accommodation. I toy with the idea of using one of the seedier ones for old times’ sake (I could produce an encyclopedia of the dives Mum and I stayed in overseas, when she was commuting between johns) but decide against. I will have a Muslim guide to massage, after all, so I choose what looks like the biggest and best. It’s called Gracious Palace in Thai, Malaysian, and English and manages to be big, expensive, dingy, overlit, and sleazy all at once. At reception they issue me with towels, soap, and three condoms. Well, you can’t say they’re not taking HIV seriously.

Half an hour later I have showered and changed my clothes (generic black shoes, black pants, white shirt as usual); I am strolling through the town and beginning to get the picture. What I like best is the police station. It’s a big, even majestic building encircled by a perimeter wall, on the outside of which there are maybe three hundred little bamboo huts leaning against it and a girl or two in each hut. The huts are not brothels, of course-they’re too small for that. They pretend to sell food and drink, and some of them even have small fridges with beer, but there’s no mistaking the point of the exercise.

The girls are not usually local Muslims; they tend to be Buddhists from all over Thailand, especially the poor North, who have decided to specialize in this niche market. It doesn’t pay nearly as well as the farang market in Bangkok, but it’s a lot more reliable. Every weekend and most weekdays great hordes of pious young Muslim men from Malaysia cross the border here and leave their piety on the other side. They come in expensive four-by-fours, on cheap Honda motorbikes, in buses or minibuses. Some even come by bicycle. Some come on foot. Right now, for example, the town is flooded with them. The girls have all learned Malay, and the ringgit is an accepted currency. Young men are standing or sitting in every one of the huts, purring while the girls charm them. In a way they can be more civilized than farang. They don’t come just to get laid-they want the full debauch, including alcohol and a huge cavernous disco with karaoke. The sex comes at the end of the evening, so long as they’re still sober enough.

With my professional eye I spy one beauty who owns an elegance you do not generally see outside of Krung Thep. She surveys me with a blink almost imperceptible to a nonprofessional, sees my Thai style of dressing, and discards me as a possibility. It says a lot that a woman like that is working here. It doesn’t say nearly as much as the police station, though. No one familiar with Asia can doubt that the cops charge the girls rent for the use of the perimeter wall against which to lean their huts.

As I walk, my orientation acquires ever greater accuracy. The flesh trade is everywhere, it is the economy of this town, there is really nothing else. I think of Mustafa: what an affront it must be to him; what torture to his pure soul to walk through this town day after day. In every hotel lobby, every café, restaurant, and street corner, there’s a huddle of women somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age. Usually they look past me, for they have trained themselves to specialize in Malays, but most seem amenable to persuasion, should I weaken. Not exactly a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism: I think any Al Qaeda evangelist would be laughed out of town. Muhammad himself couldn’t incite these local guys to a jihad: they’re in Islamic heaven already.

I try to think of the farang Mitch Turner hanging out here month after month. Well, it seems he bolted for Soi Cowboy at least once. I can see why. Prostitution aside, this is a small, claustrophobic town.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a young Muslim man pull out a cell phone and speak into it. Did I imagine that involuntary jerk of the chin in my direction? While he is talking, I pull out my own cell phone and call Mustafa: engaged. That would prove nothing to a properly trained cop, but to a third-worldy working on intuition, it’s pretty conclusive.

As soon as the young man closes his phone, I call Mustafa again: it rings.

“Sonchai, where are you?”

“You know where I am.”

A pause. “I’ll come now.”

He arrives on foot within ten minutes. I’m seeing him in context now, his context, this serious young man of Islam. I want to observe his reaction to the prostitutes who are responsible for the town’s economy: his town, his economy. But he seems hardly to notice them. A mission of some kind has usurped his imagination. He looks grimly ahead, walking tall, straight-spined like his father. There is no denying the beauty of his surrender to Allah-no serious meditator could fail to approve-but the Buddha gave us the middle path; I see no golden mean in Mustafa’s. Without his father’s restraining hand, he could clear the town with a bomb and hardly notice. We do not wai each other; without the old man our recognition is neutral, like enemies who find a common purpose for a moment, before resuming an ancient feud.

“I have the key,” he says, not looking at me and fishing in his pockets.

“Not on the street, Mustafa,” I say. I guide him into a café, where I order a 7-Up and he drinks water. He is uncomfortable here, even though the café does not serve alcohol. I think he would be uncomfortable in any surrounding designed to induce congeniality. I see it in tantalizingly vague and elusive mental images from many centuries ago: even then he was impaled by that same single-mindedness that is a form of tunnel vision. Buddhism was too subtle for him then, as it is today. To the evolved mind of the Gautama Buddha, any desire was an obscene distortion, even the desire for God. Mustafa is one of those passionate souls who were made for Islam, the warrior religion.

“Relax,” I tell him. “Open your mind. I need information.”

“What information?” He is startled and defensive. For him, our meeting here was circumscribed with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He has no idea how Western this quaint shrinking of reality is.

“Well, how about the address?”

A blink: “I was going to show you, but you insisted on coming in here.”

“Good. In a minute you will show me where Mr. Mitch Turner lived. That is the future, Mustafa. Let’s stay in the present. Don’t you like it here?”

He looks around and shrugs. “It’s just a café.”

I cannot penetrate this iron skull. But I was his teacher once, and he loved me with the very same fierceness, the same passion, the same blindness. “Mustafa, let me tell you something: you are brilliant at what you do. It’s really not that easy, even in a small town like this, to have someone followed, to know where they are minute to minute. But your network has been on my tail since I arrived. I didn’t notice myself until I saw one of your people with his cell phone, and even then it was just a hunch on my part.”

“So? My father has to know what is going on at all times. I told you that in Krung Thep. It is his network, not mine. He says-” He breaks off, scared of saying too much.

“What? What does your father say?”

“He says there is nothing more threatening to the modern world than a moderate Muslim. The fanatics hate us because they think we are heretics and cowards, and the West hates us because we have a morality it lost a long time ago-many farang are converting to us, especially in America. I have to protect my father.”

“So you run the network that he put in place?”

“Yes.”

“So you probably know more about Mitch Turner than anyone on earth. At least, the Mitch Turner who lived here in Songai Kolok for however many months.”

“More than eight months.” He catches my eye and allows the faintest trace of a smirk. “Eight months and two weeks.”

“Your people followed him wherever he went, didn’t they?”

“My father told you, we were trying to keep him alive. The only way to do that was to keep an eye on him.”

“Did he know?”

A shake of the head. “He was very stupid.” He looks me in the eye. “No, that is not the word, but he was a typical farang, lost, confused, pulled in a thousand directions like a man consumed by demons. He lived in his head and saw very little of the outside world. I could have had ten men following him in a line, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Of course, being farang he thought he was the only one doing the spying. He deteriorated after the first month. A whore came to see him from Bangkok from time to time. He used drugs. He went through a bad patch, he thought he was undergoing a religious conversion. That’s when he went to see my father. But it was just his Western psychosis. Why do farang think that God loves crazies? Allah loves men of steel.”

“A whore? D’you know who?”

“No. She never stayed long enough for us to find out.”

“You didn’t get a picture?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We didn’t need to. He kept a picture of her in his apartment. If you had not insisted on coming into this café, you could have been looking at it right now.”

Oh Mustafa, I want to say, you haven’t changed at all.

“You searched his apartment regularly?”

“Not regularly.” The question has thrown him a little.

“Mustafa,” I say. He looks me in the eye. “If you want me to conduct a full investigation and produce a convincing report, you will have to tell me everything.”

Reluctantly: “One of our electronics experts from over the border gave us a device, some gadget that recorded the keystrokes of his computer. Naturally, we had to get into the apartment to fix it in place, then again to take it away.”

I can hardly control a smile and find some solace in the grin that is building on Mustafa’s face. He controls himself immediately, however.

I maintain an admiring smile while I speak: “The device recorded the first keystrokes he used whenever he went online, didn’t it? His access code, in other words. That’s why you only needed the device to be in place for a short time. You got into the CIA database?”

“Not at every level. After access, there are many different checks. We never got beyond the gossip.” To my raised eyebrows: “That’s what we called it, because that’s what it basically was. Just a lot of junk, the kind of crap they love to talk about.”

I had decided to wait until morning before trying Turner’s apartment, but absent getting laid, there is really nothing to do in this town, and anyway the setup has begun to intrigue me. I think of my spacious but seedy hotel room and decide to stick with Mustafa.

Mitch Turner’s local address turned out to be just around the corner from where we were sitting. It is a five-story apartment building, very close to the police station. When we enter, the concierge, who lives and works in a small room with a single bed, a television, and a view of the entrance, turns away from Mustafa with a stony look.

“A Buddhist. One of yours,” Mustafa explains.

“You intimidated him to get the key?”

“I didn’t do a thing.” A pause. “Didn’t need to.”

I’m breathless by the time we reach the top floor and sweating in the night heat. Mustafa seems unaffected by the climb. When we enter the apartment, what hits me immediately is the view over the police station, the perimeter of which is dense with young men and women and cacophonous with a thousand cheap stereo systems all blasting out a mixture of Thai and Malaysian pop.

I share a glance with Mustafa, who nods toward the master bedroom. I first see a small stack of books, then: there it is, in a place of honor next to the single bed: a silver-framed picture of Chanya.

She has to be in the States because she’s wearing a padded parka coat and looks just about as cold as a Thai can get in those northern climes. She looks happy enough, however, and that amazing smile of hers shines through. Even though you can see nothing of her figure under that parka, you just know that that is an exceptionally attractive woman staring into the camera lens. Come to think of it, there is something special about that picture. I think it was taken by a man in love.

What a terrific exercise in perception I’m experiencing, like something out of a Buddhist manual. I replay that moment in the bar when Chanya seduced a sullen, dumb, weightlifting, whoremongering moron and substitute a highly intelligent, educated, sensitive man who already knew her and obviously adored her. I’m so damn lonely, he told her. You look beautiful tonight. So why did she kill him? Why did she mutilate him? Why did she skin him? I check Mustafa’s eyes, but they have glazed over. No curiosity here about the farang’s love life. I wonder what Mustafa does with his mind in those moist moments that even fanatics experience. Do they all simply postpone, pending paradise?

“You know who she is?” I ask him.

He shrugs. What does it matter? She was just a whore from out of town, of no more consequence to him than a ball of fluff. She was not part of any war that interested him. I allow myself the luxury of dwelling on her face (that smile) for a few moments: no way Mustafa is going to read my heart, which I have to admit has sunk just a tad. I pull open the picture frame and take out the picture of Chanya, which I pocket.

Unable to follow up on the mystery of the picture, I examine that small stack of books on the bedside table. Huckleberry Finn, a black Bible, the biography of the FBI spy Robert Hanssen by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller, a translation into English of Dante’s Inferno, a copy of the Koran in English, The Encyclopedia of Arachnids, Advanced Spider Keeping, and Problems in Identification and Classification of Asian Arachnids. I flick through the vivid color plates: scorpions luminescent under ultraviolet light. I raise my eyes to Mustafa.

“He collected them, I forgot to tell you. At first we thought he was genuinely insane. We used to watch him crouching in dark alleys with some kind of little net and a bottle.”

The rest of the books are in Japanese script, indecipherable to both of us. One includes pictures, though, lithographic prints of samurai dueling with their famous curved swords. As I flick through the book, I see it is some kind of manual. There are photographs of samurai swords and diagrams that seem to show how one is made.

“He was fluent in Japanese,” Mustafa explains. “We think that was his main qualification, what got him into the CIA. He had Japanese friends.”

Finally, Mustafa gives way to the disgust that has been building since we entered the flat. “How can children like this hope to lead the world? Look at the books, at his life. This was a thirty-year-old teenager, a consumer kid taking culture off a supermarket shelf: samurai stuff from Japan, a whore from Bangkok, a little Christianity here, a little Islam there, when he wasn’t hunting for spiders or smoking opium.” He looks about to spit.

“Smoking opium?”

He grunts, unwilling to say more.

I follow him around the rest of the flat while he throws glances of contempt into odd corners. We find the terrarium on a shelf against a back wall in the spare bedroom. Mustafa peers at it, then shakes his head. “Nobody fed them.” I peer into the rectangular space behind the glass: dried corpses of hairy tarantulas, a scorpion with babies on her back, other spiders dead in their webs as if in the aftermath of a cataclysm.

In a cupboard Mustafa finds a cheap telescope of the kind that can be bought in department stores. Our exchange of glances is a classic example of telepathy. If Mitch Turner needed a good telescope, he would have persuaded the CIA to supply a state-of-the-art model. So he used this one for what?

“Checking out the action around the police station,” Mustafa grunts.

There doesn’t seem to be anything else of immediate significance, nothing that would explain Mitch Turner’s violent death anyway. I observe that there is no laptop, but Mustafa says whenever Turner left the apartment for any length of time, he took a laptop with him, probably following standing orders to check it into a bank vault or safe-deposit box. Well, there doesn’t seem to be much more we can do tonight, so we leave the apartment and Mustafa locks the door.

Out on the street the night is in full swing. The whole town is alive with disco music and flashing neon signs from cheap hotels. A tall and very thickset Malay in his late thirties is ushering three girls into his hotel as we pass. Three? I shoot a glance at Mustafa, but he’s in whatever space he uses to block out unacceptable aspects of reality. I wonder if he saw them at all, those three very attractive girls who seemed to be enjoying themselves? I guess that within his superstition those women would be seen as pure evil, seductive emissaries of Satan. Well, looks like that Malay and those girls are going to be merrily rolling in it for the next few hours, after which all participants will retire satisfied and sleep the sleep of the just. I do not explain to Mustafa that in the Game women often prefer to share their labor-they may even see it as a kind of perk in that they demand extra for doing less. It’s more fun, too, if you have a friend or colleague to chat with in your own language while you’re working the john. For country girls there’s an echo from the rice harvest, when everyone has to pitch in, and there’s a lot of chatting and flirting and you tell jokes to pass the time, hardly noticing what your hands are doing. I think of the big dark Malay laid out like a rice paddy while the girls work him and discuss the dollar-baht exchange rate across his erection. I pity Mustafa, who so resolutely rejects the simple dance of life, the humor. At the same time I wonder how Mitch Turner, the confused American spy, took it all.

There don’t seem to be any cafés with spare tables and chairs, not with any privacy anyway, so we end up in the lobby of our hotel, which has been transformed into a kind of anteroom for a gigantic brothel. Girls are sitting on all the sofas, and as we watch, dark-skinned young men with pencil mustaches approach one or another. They are different from farang in that the deal is done so quickly, usually within five minutes. No romantic buildup, more an Asian-style business deal. The woman is happy enough with that, since it might mean she can fit in more than one customer tonight. Some of the couples start immediately for the lifts, but most wander out into the street in search of a disco, where the young gallant can demonstrate his expertise in karaoke and the lady will applaud with adulation in her eyes.

Mustafa doesn’t want to look at it, so we find an empty table in a corner. He still has some explaining to do, so I give him the silent treatment.

“You are wondering why we took such interest in one individual, when there are hundreds like him in Thailand?”

“Yes.”

“You must ask my father for a full explanation. According to him, the farang Mitch Turner was a fascinating product of the West. He said that just as intelligence agencies like to take terrorist bombs apart to see how they are made, so we should look into the soul of this strange fish, this human bomb, to see how it was made. After all, he didn’t invent himself-he was a creature of his culture.”

“His naÏveté, confusion, lack of center?”

“All those things, but what most interested my father was his spiritual agony. You must understand that although my father is very learned, he hardly ever meets farang, especially not American spies. My father is a great imam, which is to say a connoisseur of souls. Mitch Turner interested him a lot. Until he met Turner, I think he doubted that farang had souls. When he saw what a mess Turner was in, what he called the ‘great howl of agony’ at the center of this man, he felt he’d understood why the West is the way it is.” A ghost of a smile. “It was as if he’d cracked a code and now could read the Western mind.” Staring into my eyes: “He told me he would never have believed it was possible for a man to be so tormented and still live, still function.” Excited now, sharing a passion with me for the first time: “He also said that without a war, America would descend into total confusion and would have to turn itself into a police state to survive, because its people no longer have any internal structure. Americans can never be defeated by war. It is peace they find intolerable.”

“He reached these conclusions on the basis of one specimen?”

“Why not? True knowledge comes from Allah. It does not need scientific method, only a clue, a hint for the spirit to follow.”

As he speaks, I note that he is watching the action in a totally unseeing way, like a show in a language he does not understand. For me, though, it is impossible not to take a professional interest in what is going on all over the rest of the lobby: the young men approaching the girls, the big ironic smile on the faces of the women; the man’s complex mixture of shyness, courage, arrogance, urgency, and anticipation, the woman’s searching eyes, trying to guess what sort of lover this one will be while they negotiate; the mutual relief that is almost a kind of orgasm when they reach a deal; the abrupt change of body language when they put their arms around each other and make for the lifts or walk out into the night. I know that Mustafa, if he sees anything of interest at all, sees only sin, which will no doubt be eradicated sooner or later by Allah-along with a whole range of other activities that I consider merely human.

When I tell him I’m going to sleep, he stands up immediately, like one who has been released from a dirty job.

14

Back in my room I made the mistake of drinking a couple of Singha beers from the minibar. They knocked me out for a few hours, and now I’m awake with quite a thirst and a slight headache. (Drink Kloster or Heineken, farang, when you come for your vacation-they’re cleaner brews.) The worst of it is, I’m fully conscious, and when I use the remote to switch on the TV, I see from the information bar that it’s four-thirteen in the morning. As I lie on the bed I remember my dream, in which Chanya came to me. The quality of light, the expression on her face, the whole atmosphere of the dream, tell me it was a communication from her of some kind, though I cannot decipher its meaning. She and I occasionally discussed Buddhism. She was a keen meditator herself, and our backgrounds were so similar we often speculated that we had known each other in previous lifetimes, perhaps a great many. We were too shy to say it, but we both wondered if we were not soul mates of the kind that meet up lifetime after lifetime. Only when karma is very favorable do such soul mates succeed in having a full-blooded relationship; after all, that would be the next best thing to enlightenment itself. More often we look out for each other from a distance, like guardian angels. I feel I’m her guardian at the moment, but in the dream it seemed the other way around. Restless, I pull some clothes on and go down to the lobby.

All the girls are gone, except for five who are hanging around on a couple of the sofas. From their snippets of conversation that I overhear, it seems that only two of them had customers tonight; the other three have not been lucky and are moaning about the number of women in town. There just aren’t enough men to go around. At the reception desk the clerk is asleep in his chair, his head resting on his folded arms on his desk. He starts when I try to wake him and gives a sullen shake of the head when I ask to use the business center where there is Internet access. I offer money, but still he refuses. The business center doesn’t open until nine in the morning. I’m in a stubborn mood and toy with the idea of threatening to bust the whole joint, but that would not be playing the game. Instead I cajole him, make him laugh, offer some cash again, and this time he consents to let me use the hotel’s Internet access from behind the reception desk.

I’m so keen to check my e-mail because I want to know if I’ve got a reply from Superman. When I check the list of new messages, I feel a dull, bruised sensation in my heart because there is nothing from Mike Smith, even though with the eleven-hour time difference that is hardly surprising. I take a couple of minutes to scan through the usual business stuff (another gang of unruly old men who had such a good time six months ago, they want to come back for Christmas), before I notice the new correspondent: chanya@yahoo.com.

Her message is very brief: Sonchai, here is the diary I told you about. Chanya.

The attachment, on the other hand, is more than five hundred kilobytes, nearly as long as a novel, and of course it is in Thai script. As I start to read, I’m impressed by the clarity and simplicity of the writing. Only a noble soul writes like that. I am also totally absorbed. When the clerk starts to get restless, I have to bribe him again to let me print out the whole of her diary, which I take upstairs to my room and spend the rest of the night reading. I’m hollow-eyed by the time I meet Mustafa in the hotel lobby in the morning.

Out in the street, on the way to Turner’s apartment, Mustafa’s cell phone rings; well, actually, it makes no sound, merely vibrates in his pocket, and he fishes it out in an instant. A few words in the local dialect, and he closes it again and slides it back in his pocket. “They’re here already.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

As we turn a corner into the street where Turner’s apartment is located, he nods toward the building. Two farang in tropical cream business suits, white shirts, and ties are on the point of entering the building.

“You see what I mean?” Mustafa says. “It is more arrogance than stupidity. They might as well have ‘CIA’ stamped on their jackets, but they cannot believe we’re smart enough to work out what they are.”

Maybe he has a point, but we’ll have to abort our examination of the apartment. Not at all sure what to do next, we stroll a little closer to the building and find a café with a view of the street. I order a 7-Up, and Mustafa orders water. We’re both wondering how two farang in business suits are going to negotiate their way past the concierge.

Not easily, it seems. Within minutes they’re leaving the building with frowns on their faces. Worried frowns, it seems to me. Mustafa looks at me with a touch of insolence: Okay, cop, now what d’you want to do?

“Watch,” I say. I go to the door of the café and call out in English, “Can I help you?” as the two men pass. They stop in their tracks, a little surprised but pleased to find a fluent English speaker in this remote town.

“You guys look a little lost,” I say, using the kind of smile that’s supposed to go with words like that. (I can’t decide on my accent-I can do British or American. Generally one uses Brit when talking to an American and vice versa: the two cultures seem to intimidate each other quite well. On instinct, though, I use American with Enthusiastic Immigrant coloring, and in a flash they decide I have Green Card written all over me; obviously, I’m the best they can hope for down here.)

They start to talk. Now we are all doing Sympathetic American Abroad, a specialized genre in which the superiority of farang culture, the stupidity of the native population, and the poor health standards and the appalling state of the plumbing are all expressed subliminally, without a single politically incorrect word passing anyone’s lips. Using basic cues, I give the impression of a native son-Buddhist, not Muslim-who has returned from the United States on vacation and despises his hometown. Mustafa has retreated into a psychological shadow and throws me hostile glances from time to time.

While we’re talking banalities, I take in the two Americans. The older is in his mid-fifties, slim and wiry, a military fitness about him, a short spiky haircut, and intelligence of the ruthless variety about those thin lips. And something else that I cannot put my finger on. Something not quite American. Or human. Does it surprise you, farang, that a good ten percent of the entities you see walking around in human form are not human at all? It’s been going on for a few hundred years now: immigrants from the Outer Limits, with their own agendas. Call them Special Forces from the Other Side. The final conflict won’t be long now.

The other is young, perhaps not as young as he looks. To a tropical type like me, that blond hair and simplified Nordic face-you’ve seen that jawline in cartoons-looks maybe seventeen, but I suppose he must be mid- to late twenties.

All of a sudden I am key in the Americans’ pursuit of happiness. Big smiles and an obscene parody of Oriental humility and deference as they introduce themselves properly, shake hands, enter the café, and sit down at the table. Well, at least they’re smart enough to be polite.

“Like I say”-I still have that smile plastered all over my face-“I’m just here on a discover-my-roots trip. I was born here, but Mom and Dad escaped stateside when I was still a kid, thank God.”

Unable to resist this patriotic call, the younger one gives a sincere smile, while the older one simply nods.

They order Cokes. Their body language indicates they’re quite ready to lose Mustafa, who remains silent as if enveloped in an invisible chador and clearly makes them nervous.

Making it up as I go: “I’m thinking of doing a trip down south myself, planning to take that jungle train the books talk about. Supposed to be quite something.”

“Is that right?” Politely, but sharing glances with each other.

“Yeah. What are you two guys doing here? Going south yourselves, or have you just come up from there?”

Sharing that glance again: “Oh, well, we’re here on business, actually.”

“You are? In a town like this? Well, I’m not going to ask, but I can’t imagine what kind of business an American could have here. Hell, it’s all Muslim, you know. Except at night when it’s all sex, ha-ha.”

Sheepish grins. “Yes, well, we only got here last night. Took the plane to Hat Yai from Bangkok, then a four-hour taxi ride. We didn’t really know what to expect. Neither of us has been here before. Actually, we’re looking for a colleague of ours.”

“Oh yeah? An American?”

“That’s right. I wonder if we could, ahm…” The hint is for Mustafa to lose himself, but he doesn’t take it. One more glance, and a nod is exchanged. “Look-ah, frankly we’re a little worried about our friend. We haven’t heard from him in a week now, and well, to look at he’s pretty obviously an American, and this is a very Islamic town.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” I give them a big worried shake of the head. “How awful.”

“Yes, well, we don’t know if it’s awful or not, but we were wondering…” It seems it’s hard for them to say exactly what they were wondering with Mustafa sitting at the table.

“Would I be right in thinking your colleague lives in that apartment building over there? The one I just saw you come out of?”

“Correct. That’s what we were wondering, if there might be an informal way of taking a look at the apartment, without necessarily getting the police involved, just to check that there’s been no foul play.”

“Informal?” I’m frowning with my head to one side.

Coughs. “Yes, look, we’re not all that familiar with your country, and the last thing we want to do is to cause offense, but if there were some way in which a person of influence could talk with that concierge… You’re from around here, you speak the language. Maybe he has a key? We just want to make sure our friend’s okay.”

I’m still frowning uncomprehendingly, but I’ve added that special gleam of Third World Greed.

“Oh, we’d be willing to pay for your time, wouldn’t we?”

“More than willing. A quick glance into that apartment would be worth quite a lot to us, I’d say.” I raise my eyebrows. “Oh, we’d make it worth your while.”

“Keep your money,” I say with a smile. “Let’s just wander over and see what we can do, shall we?” I frown in concentration. “But just in case the authorities get involved, I ought to know exactly who you are. Do you have your passports with you?”

“Passports? Sure.”

“Could I take just a quick peek at your visas?”

Two blue passports with eagles on the front appear. I see they are both holding business visas. The older one is named Hudson, and the young blond is Bright. I hand the passports back. “What is your business? Are you working in Thailand?”

Their command of their mutual cover story is really quite smooth. It seems they are executives in the telecommunications industry, more on the infrastructure side than marketing. Mitch Turner is stationed down here to get a general impression of the political situation right on the border. Nobody wants to invest in heavy engineering costs only to find that civil strife or terrorism has ruined the project.

“So he’s a kind of industrial spy?” I ask.

The word does not faze them at all. No, not a spy, that would be overstating it, let’s say the advance guard of a feasibility study.

“I see,” I say. “And you think our local Muslims might have taken a dislike to him?”

Deep frowns. I seem to have hit a nerve. “That would be the worst case. It could be anything. He could be in his bed right now suffering some kind of seizure. He could have gotten hit by a truck. Until we get inside his apartment, it’s going to be hard even to hypothesize.”

The four of us cross the street together. Mustafa finds a way of guiding me into the concierge’s office, then out again triumphantly holding the key. “Money talks around here,” I explain.

Up three flights of stairs with everyone sweating in the tropical heat, then we’re in Turner’s apartment. A quick look, and it is obvious that Mitch Turner is not here. They seem to be on the lookout for something specific, which I would guess to be Turner’s laptop, and don’t take much interest in anything else. Mustafa and I watch them rummage around in a wardrobe. They pay some attention to the empty silver picture frame but soon give it a shrug. Finally the older one, Hudson, gives me a brief smile. “Well, he’s not here, and there are no signs that he left in a hurry.”

Mustafa, though, has stationed himself by the front door, blocking it with his big shoulders. A mean look has come over his features. “They palmed something,” he snaps at me in Thai. “Something they found in that wardrobe in the bedroom.”

I’m doing Disappointment and Consternation when I take up a position next to Mustafa and engage Hudson ’s eyes. “Come on, guys, we saw you palm it.”

An exchange of glances between the two. “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” says Bright, the younger one. He makes a face of muffled triumph: Clark Kent has disrobed. Hudson seems less sure. I think he’s seen through me, at least to the extent of not making any assumptions.

“I brought you here in good faith,” I say. “I can’t let you steal anything.”

“Well, you see,” Bright begins, but is silenced by a gesture from Hudson.

“We’re here on government business,” Hudson says in a reasonable tone. “ U.S. government.”

Bright checks my face: isn’t that enough?

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t,” says Bright. “You’ll just have to take our word for it.”

“Oh? Well, the Royal Thai Police might have a different view.” I take out my police ID to show them. Bright is nonplussed in the way of Caucasians: he turns crimson, his mouth makes strange shapes, and he throws repetitive glances at Hudson, who is carefully studying my ID. “Nothing will be removed from this room.”

Hudson and Bright do an eye-shift, which means I don’t know who I’m dealing with (i.e., the most powerful blah blah blah…), so I go into Thai Malicious. My suddenly cynical expression says that Third World Revenge starts here: sure you can invade, but then whatchagonnado? This tar baby just gets stickier and stickier, and you really don’t want to spend even a week in a Thai jail, much less the year or so I have in mind. The threat of quagmire focuses Hudson, who nudges Bright, who takes the cue and fishes something out of his pocket and hands it to me. (We’ll get it back once we have your ass kicked by someone who understands who we really are.) I still don’t know what the hell it is. It’s a kind of slim oval about two and a half inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, half an inch deep in smooth gray plastic, with the words SONY MICRO VAULT stamped on the end.

The atmosphere is strained as I lead the CIA out of the apartment and let them watch while Mustafa the dark-skinned Muslim locks the door to Turner’s apartment and pockets the key with a proprietary air. It occurs to me that this incriminating move is the last thing his father would have wanted, but it has discomfited the two spies. We find ouselves out in the street, where the vehement heat and Islamic costumes further disorient them. They walk away without saying goodbye.

15

It’s lunchtime, but Mustafa and I have different tastes. He leaves me to go off to a Muslim restaurant, while I seek out a Thai canteen that is famous for the heat of its grataa rawn, a sizzling variety show of marine life. Actually, I could just as well have eaten some lamb with Mustafa, but I wanted to be alone for a moment. I pull out the picture of Chanya while I’m waiting for the grataa rawn. I would almost have preferred the simple case I first assumed it to be: an irrational outbreak of violence from an overstressed whore. Now the complexity seems infinite and infinitely impenetrable. I really have no idea what’s going on or where it all will lead.

I’m in a pretty somber state of mind when Mustafa arrives at the restaurant in a pickup truck. It’s a Toyota four-by-four with three young men in the back. I guess from the bulges they are armed guards. Mustafa and I sit in the front of the truck with the driver while the guards, scarves covering their heads and faces against the dust, bump up and down on a bench in the open back.

The road out of town leads northeast, and we soon leave the paved highway for a rutted track. There is no air-con in the cab, so we drive with the windows open. The heat down here is always a few degrees higher than in Bangkok; it doesn’t sound like much, but when you live at the upper limit of what the human frame can tolerate, it makes a difference. When we slow down to accommodate the rutted terrain, I feel like we’re in a mobile oven. The terrain is lush, though, even for Thailand, because they have a lot more rain down here. When the driver finally stops the truck and we get out, the intensity of the silence hits us all between the eyes. We’ve been rattling up and down in a noisy vehicle for more than half an hour; suddenly there is only a single cicada with the energy to rub its legs together.

Mustafa beckons to me, and I follow him down a footpath that leads into a tranquil valley in which the only buildings are a large wooden house on stilts and a tiny mosque, apparently made of wood that has somehow been fashioned to produce a dome. He tells me to stay with the guards while he checks on his father. He emerges from the house with joy in his face and beckons for me to climb the stairs to join him. Inside the house the old imam with the fire in his black eyes welcomes me with his usual hospitality. We sit on mats drinking peppermint tea. My report is brief but welcome. Of course, in light of the photograph of Chanya in Mitch Turner’s bedroom in Songai Kolok, no responsible cop could avoid the conclusion that Chanya killed Mitch Turner, for whatever reason. They knew each other; she went back to his hotel when he came to Bangkok. Whatever happened in the hotel room, only she came out alive.

The imam has been examining my face while I speak. “But your Colonel is strangely keen to protect this prostitute. Why is that?”

“She’s a key worker. These things happen from time to time. I guess he’s just protecting the club and its reputation.”

“You will put your report in writing?”

“I can’t do that without permission.”

Silence. Mustafa looks angry.

The old man says: “If Colonel Vikorn changes his mind under pressure from the Americans, will you warn us?”

“Yes,” I say. “Okay.” A long shot comes to mind. I’m shy to ask the question, considering its mystic origin, but what the hell? “Does the name Don Buri mean anything to you?” Blank glances.

The interview is over, and I go back to town in the truck with Mustafa, who is wrestling with some karmic obsession and says nothing throughout the journey. Indeed, he hardly manages to say goodbye.

Back in my hotel room I call Vikorn with my heart in my mouth. “I’m just about finished down here.” I tell him about Hudson and Bright, the picture of Chanya.

“So?”

“I’m convinced Chanya did it.”

Impatiently: “Well, what else is new?”

“So it wasn’t a Muslim assassination.”

A pause. “I hope you’re not resurrecting that bleeding heart of yours?”

“It’s not a bleeding heart, it’s practical politics. If we try to blame Al Qaeda, it could have repercussions down here.”

Even more impatiently: “Nobody’s blaming Al Qaeda. You wrote her fucking statement yourself. Chanya acted in self-defense.”

“She knew him from the States. He had a picture of her in his apartment. She sent me a copy of the diary she kept when she was over there. They were longtime lovers.”

A longer pause. “You better get back here.”

“I think I should make a written report-”

“No.”

“If the CIA find out that she knew him, the cover story won’t work, and you’ll start blaming Muslims. That’s your B plan, isn’t it?”

“Get back here.”

“If the Americans put pressure on us and our government gets clumsy, there could be war down here.”

“War or no war, people die. They’re always causing trouble in the South. Don’t you want to save Chanya?”

“I don’t want to be responsible for an insurrection.”

“Then tell Buddha it’s all my fault. Obedience is part of the Eightfold Path; you tend to forget that from time to time. Read my lips: no written report.”

16

Rebirth, farang (in case you’re wondering): You are lounging on a magnificent balcony open to the starry sky, divine music is playing with such exquisite perfection you can hardly stand it, when all of a sudden something terrible occurs: the magical sounds break up into an obscene cacophony. What is happening? Are you dying? You could put it that way. That awful noise is the first scream of an infant: you. You have been born into a human body hardwired with each and every transgression from the last time around, and now you must spend the next seventy years clawing your way back to the music. No wonder we cry.