Grandad, There's A Head on the Beach

3.

One of my chores at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort was to prepare meals for the family and, on rare occasions, the guests. Sooner than listen to Mair's headboard, I went to the kitchen early to fix something for our two paying visitors. I was sure they wouldn't have had a moment's sleep in that mildewy, lizard-happy, wind-rattling room and would be on the road early. So, as I wanted them to have at least one positive memory to take from us, I bought some of Jiep's excellent rice porridge in plastic bags and stewed my own o-liang orange tea, thick with sugar, as a going-away present. I needed to waylay them long enough to ask about the missing number plates. That was one of the three mysteries I'd decided to solve that day. The second was to follow my anonymous head and find out who he was and how he'd come to be on our beach. Although I'd lied to Bigman Beung about writing an article, further thought had told me it might not have been such a bad idea.

The Chumphon News, a weekly, was the nearest thing we had to a local paper. It was based in Chumphon town, eighty kilometers north along the highway. (Chumphon's claim to fame was that it boasted a Tesco, a Carrefour, and a Macro all within a kilometer of each other. In Thailand, our superstores liked to huddle.) I'd done a couple of human interest features for the News and the odd petty crime report. My last expose had been on the smuggling of carrots from China. They paid less than for a table clearer at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but news was in my blood. It's what I did. I needed the buzz of seeing my name in print. And that and my antidepressant trial constituted my total income at the time. I decided I would do a piece on head retrieval and visit the foundation whose job it was to trace the families of the dead. And if, in the process, I could get Ben and Socrates fired, all the better.

My third mystery, and I'd moved my food preparation table to the window so I could observe our cabins, was to discover who had been so active in Mair's bed, night and morning. So far I'd seen nothing. I gutted the lunch mackerel and went through a list of suspects in my mind. Since we lived in a village, I doubted she'd be silly enough to mate with a married man. The smorgasbord of single men in a ten-year radius of her age group was not particularly delectable. Mair was still a good-looking woman, and I hoped she'd demonstrate a little good taste in her choice. This side of the Lang Suan river we had Dr. Prem at the health center, who turned pale at the sight of bodily waste; long-haired Nute, who taught PE at the middle school but was a foot shorter than most of the students; Grit, the good-for-nothing elder brother of Meng, our local private detective and plastic awning installer; Kow, the squid-boat captain who was devoid of front teeth and smelled of fishballs; and Daeng, the dog killer, whom she wouldn't have touched with a three-meter coconut hook. It was a depressing line-up. All I could hope was that Mair had imported someone eligible from another district, but I'd seen no strange vehicles parked round about.

If all else failed, I'd give Mair a sip of wine, stand back, and wait for the blab gates to open. I have a remarkable tolerance for alcohol, but she can't drink to save her life. She spews out embarrassing stories that would make a hooker blush. Nothing is taboo to Mair with a drink in her. Nothing, of course, apart from the whereabouts of our missing father, who fled the scene when I was a toddler, Arny was still in nappies, and Sissi was only five and still a boy. On the subject of absent fathers, Mair had taken a vow of silence that withstood the test of booze.

We were eating our rice porridge-me, Mair, Arny, and Grandad-at one of our resort tables squashed inside the kitchen. We had the shutters closed. The wind from the northeast had obviously had a bad night and was spitting mad. The coconut trees were bent like parentheses, their fronds pointing desperately to Malaysia and more temperate climes. Every now and then, a coconut would break free from the bunch and head off at a forty-five-degree angle to smash a window or fracture a water pipe. The beach was clogged with bamboo roots torn from the streams in the flash floods. They were tangled with discarded nylon nets and garnished with polystyrene. Everything smelled of effluent and old engine oil. Perhaps you can see why I love this place so.

The mother-daughter matching set from room three poked their heads in the kitchen door. Their hairstyles had been vandalized by the wind. They were not carrying suitcases.

"Good morning," said the mother. "I was wondering whether there might be a chance of a bite to-"

"Oh, my word," said Mair. "Come in and shut that door.

Of course we have food for you. Father, give them your seat.

Grandad Jah didn't budge…He was having his breakfast. Arny grabbed two folding chairs from against the wall and placed them at the table for the guests.

"Sorry about the ambience," I said, quite unnecessarily. I'd become a serial apologizer since we moved south.

"No. Not at all. This is very cozy," lied the mother.

I looked at her. Even her casual summer wear was designer. She probably had a kitchen twice this size back home just for her maids to eat in.

"Where are you from?" I asked, dishing up the rice porridge.

"Oh, we move around a lot," she said.

It was a "mind-your-own-frigging-business" answer. I'd heard a lot in my career. But she delivered the line with grace and a nice smile. The daughter hadn't yet spoken. She cast nervous glances in the direction of Arny, who sat with his shirt off. We were used to it, but he could be a little overwhelming to outsiders. He was built like a stack of tractor tires. He gushed testosterone. Yet despite his physique and his movie-star good looks-both of which make me think I must have been adopted-he was apparently unaware of the effect he had on others. Some feared him the way you'd be nervous of a killer whale heading down your driveway. Some, both men and women, desired his body, caring not whether he had a mind or a personality. Some felt that animal urge to challenge him. The daughter didn't know what to make of him at all. She was a mid-twenties jaw-dropper, and I'd wager she had saliva trails following her wherever she went. She was used to seduction and had come to expect it. So when naked-torso hunk said "Good morning" and returned to his breakfast without even a cursory glance at her breasts, she was plainly dumfounded.

There was no other woman for Arny. He had met his true love, Gaew, right here in Maprao. She too was a weightlifter. She too had toured the body glamour circuit and won prizes. She too had fallen into that same pit of passion that had claimed my brother. She had taken both his heart and, so we believed at the time, his virginity, in the space of a week. There was only one buckle in this wheel of passion and that was her age. Arny was thirty-two. His "fiancee," Gaew, was fifty-eight. She was the same age as our mother. She and Mair had idolized the same rock singers in high school and learned Hula-Hoop at approximately the same time. In fact, they were becoming good friends. We all liked her. But that just made her relationship with Arny…weird. Icky even. She'd won her first award when Arny was still learning to use the potty. So, that's why Arny didn't notice there was a babe in the kitchen.

The guests tucked into their food with gusto. If they had problems with eating with commoners, they didn't show it. I was heating up the gooey orange tea and planning another subterfuge for extracting conversation.

"Sorry about your room," I said.

"The room's wonderful," said the mother.

"Really?"

I couldn't think of one thing that was wonderful about cabin three apart from the fact that it wasn't cabin two. Cabin two had a mouse tap-dance studio in the ceiling.

"We appreciate the simplicity here," she said. "One can get too dependent on luxury items in the city. I'm a firm believer that one needs to stop and experience frugality once in a while."

And here she'd landed slap in the capital of frugality. What luck.

"We were expecting you to be back on the road at first light," I told her.

"We had planned to but it's so lovely here I think we might stay a day or two."

That's when I knew she was lying. Lovely? You'd have to be blind drunk or just plain blind to see anything lovely in Maprao in the monsoon season…especially at the Not So Lovely Resort. These two were up to something. I was planning to creep around the block and sneak up on them from the rear with my next question, but Grandad Jah went at them full throttle.

"You got no registration plates on your car," he told them. "That's illegal."

The guests looked at each other and giggled nervously.

"We were coming over the bridge in Lang Suan, the one on the highway," said the mother mechanically. "The road there is riddled with potholes. And of course we hit one of them and the license plate at the front just dropped off. So we st-"

"How did you know?" asked Grandad.

"Know what, uncle?"

"How did you know the plate dropped off. You got an A/C car, so you didn't hear it. It's under the bumper, so you didn't see it. And it's flat, so you sure as hell didn't feel it. So…?"

I could see a desperation in the woman's eyes as she searched for another lie. Her daughter came to the rescue.

"The car behind us beeped," she said. "We stopped and the driver told us we'd lost our registration plate back on the road. We retrieved it and took it to the garage at the main intersection, and they said the housing unit was rusted almost completely away. Same with the one at the back. So the owner is welding us new…new housing units to…to attach the plates."

She didn't look at us, just sighed and ran her spoon around the inside of her bowl. I glared at Grandad, but I could tell he was already satisfied these two were up to no good. We both knew a two-year-old Honda wasn't going to rust away to nothing. We both knew that the only way anyone would beep you on Highway 41 would be to pull you over and mug you at gunpoint. And why not take a hotel room in town? Why drive all the way to the coast without plates? But an interrogation would only frighten these two away, and like Grandad, I wanted them to stick around. I wanted the chance to use my investigative skills. I only have a small nose, barely a squirrel snout. But it can sniff. Oh yes can it sniff. And my nose sensed a story. A big one.

I'm not sure what it was Mair sensed, but she said, "You'll have to excuse my father. He's a little senile." Grandad's eyebrows almost took off. "Sometimes he thinks he's a detective. Like on the television. He can be impolite at times."

"Yeah. Right," said Grandad. He stood and took his bowl to the sink. "Can I wear my SWAT jacket today?"

"Maybe later," said Mair.

Arny watched Grandad push against the door with all his might and thrust himself into the wind. My brother had no idea what was going on. Sometimes the world was too subtle for him.

"Any more in the pot?" he asked.

The Southern Rescue Mission Foundation had a large car park in front and several sheds around the perimeter with spotlessly clean SUVs and trucks and towing vehicles parked facing forward awaiting the next emergency. While the child-care agencies struggled to pay staff and feed the hungry, the lords of the dead played cards in air-conditioned waiting rooms, ate healthy meals in their canteen, and emptied themselves in state-of-the-art, flushing, American Standard lavatories with free tissue paper you didn't have to dispose of in a pedal bin. I inadvertently parked our Toyota Mighty X in a position that might have prevented the rapid deployment of two, perhaps three shiny black SUVs not unlike the one the rats had driven. Petty? I know. But energizing.

The building marked RECEPTION was in fact a house, the design of which was lifted from the type of Home of Your Dreams catalog my ex-husband used to take into the toilet and drool over. It was a pink mansion squashed into a twenty-five-square-meter plot. I walked in through the front door, where I was assaulted simultaneously by an Alaskan air drift from four ceiling-mounted conditioners and a receptionist in a mini skirt, tights and a turtleneck sweater. She was fiftyish in make-up she probably thought made her look younger. She wai'd me violently.

"Welcome to SRM," she said in a shrill, somewhat frightening voice. "How can I help you?"

My nipples felt larger than my breasts.

"You couldn't turn down the A/C, I suppose?" I replied.

I hadn't seriously been expecting a result from my sarcasm but she immediately went for the remote.

"Chilly, isn't it," she said and chirruped down the chill factor. She came around and pulled the chair out for me. She was very accommodating. I got the feeling I could have asked her to bake me something and she'd have run off to the oven.

"I'm here to inquire about the whereabouts of someone I…of a loved one," I told her.

The features on her face suddenly drooped like a facelift's expiration date. She reached for her heart.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "This must be a terrible time for you. I sincerely hope that we at SRM will be able in some small way to relieve the burden on you and your family. Although we are a not-for-profit organization relying entirely on small donations from the general public, we do everything possible to make our accident victims comfortable before their next journey."

It was memorized and cheesy.

"I'm so pleased," I said.

"When did your…?"

I assumed she wanted me to fill in the gap.

"Uncle?" I said.

"Ah, uncles. So, so important to the harmony of a happy family. When did your uncle pass away?"

I hadn't seen her reach for the Tiger balm so I had to assume her tears for my uncle were natural. Impressive. I already had an urge to write her a check for twenty thousand baht to further the charitable work of the SRM.

"Two days ago," I said.

"So sudden. So tragic."

My loss sat so heavily on her shoulders she dropped onto her chair and sighed, then flipped open a plastic folder.

"And what was the name?" she asked.

"Mine?"

"Your uncle's."

I hadn't thought that far ahead. I wondered then why I'd opted for this untruth. Why couldn't I simply have said, "I found a head on the beach. Don't know who he was, but I was wondering how he's doing?" Why not? Because I wouldn't have made it past the sympathetic gatekeeper to the beyond, that's why. Not that I was doing that great with the lie.

"Somyuth," I said. "We heard one of your teams came to collect his…body from the beach."

"The beach? My word. What were the circumstances?"

"Fisherman. Ehm…fell overboard. Snagged in the trawler ropes. Drowned…Very sad."

"I feel for you, honestly I do. One of our cats was caught in the snake netting behind our house. Trapped, he was, for a week. Got so desperate he chewed off his own leg to get out. Limped home covered in blood, riddled with insects. He collapsed in front of us with his intestines all hanging out."

I had a feeling there'd be a punchline.

"If only he'd had an organization like ours to clean him up and make him look presentable before"-she gasped-"before that horrible moment when my little daughter came running in to see her beloved Nunu dead and disgusting."

She was good. Really she was. There was no way this woman was a mere receptionist. I bet she was the daughter or granddaughter of the venerable Chinese gentleman whose portrait hung behind her. I bet she'd drained millions from gullible relatives with this routine.

"I'm not that fond of cats," I said.

"Of course. Some people aren't."

"I just want to find Uncle…" Damn. I'd forgotten his name. "My uncle. Take him home to the family. Loved ones. You know? Uncles. So important. Where is he?"

After I'd given her a bunch of made-up names and addresses and convinced her my national ID card was in the car, she led me out of the rear door. We found ourselves in two meters of clammy open air. In front of us was another door, this in the wall of a long windowless concrete building. We entered. She flicked a switch inside, but the door closed behind us, leaving us in a black hole. Total darkness often makes me want to wet myself. Don't know why. Something deep in my subconscious that needs analysis. I was about to evacuate when a bank of fluorescent lights above us popped into life one at a time. I don't astound that easily, but I was most certainly flabbergasted by what I saw in that building. It was exactly like being in the frozen produce section at Macro. There were open refrigerated units along both walls with a narrow aisle down the center. All it lacked was the trolleys. And laid out in the units were bodies shrouded in green plastic. Only the heads were exposed, some in the throes of an agonizing death, others so at peace they might have just fancied a quick lie down. But the thing I found remarkable was that every Head had its hair combed. SRM obviously had a stylist on staff.

I walked along the aisle with the gatekeeper behind me. Some of the green plastic shrouds hinted that the bodies beneath the groomed heads were not all symmetrical or complete. There were a few ways to die in Lang Suan-old age and boredom came to mind immediately-but such horrible deaths as these could only be attributed to the carnage of Highway 41. Our roads were single-handedly culling the population. There were twenty bodies all told, but not one of them was Uncle…my uncle.

"I don't see him," I said.

"Did you look carefully? Sometimes the facial features can change after a terrible death."

"I think I know what Uncle looks like."

"Of course you do. Oh, well. Then, if it was the beach . .."

"Yes?"

"Well, there might have been a mistake. He might have been put in with…them."

"Them?"

I was put in mind of the Alien movies, tentacles and drool.

"It's almost as comfortable for them," she said and led me to a door at the end of the building. "And, of course, it's refrigerated."

"Oh, good."

"But it's a little…congested."

It seemed unfair that all these bodies should be laid out with room to turn over, if they so desired, but that Uncle What's-his-name had to share a room. She opened the door, and I stepped up to take a look inside. It was like a skinny third-class train compartment. Two by four meters. Bodies were crammed in there on bunk shelves like pigs on their way to market. They were dressed in their own clothes, some bloody, others with no telltale sign of how they died. My uncle's head was looking down at me from an overhead luggage rack. He had a ticket attached to his left ear. I heard a voice from behind me.

"Do you…?"

I turned around. Felt quite drained of blood. The gatekeeper grabbed my arm to steady me.

"No, he's not there," I said.

"And you're certain it was one of our trucks that collected the body?"

"Black SUV. Registration number Gorgai 2544."

She looked at me as if I was the first woman to ever memorize a number plate.

"I wrote it down because the men you sent out were extremely rude," I told her. "Men like that can only give an organization a bad name and make the general public think twice about donating money."

I couldn't mention the knives because then we'd have to involve the police. Apart from the fact that most officers here moonlighted as criminals and fell somewhere between jellyfish and tree stumps on an IQ chart, there was the matter of Grandad Jah's gun and the shattered window.

"I'll look into it," she said without enthusiasm, hurrying me back along the aisle. "That is certainly one of our vehicles. Perhaps they took your uncle to the hospital. Are you sure he was dead?"

No heartbeat, respiration, nerve reaction or physiology beneath the neck.

"Pretty much," I said.

"Then all I can think is that somebody else claimed the body. Another relative?"

"You know? I was just thinking the same thing. He did have a number of minor wives dotted around. It's very likely one of them wanted his body all to themselves for the first time. Yes, that's probably it."

"Well, there you are."

And with that her interest in me vanished completely. I held my ground.

"So, if there's nothing else?" she said.

"I was just wondering…"

"Yes?"

"That little room at the end?"

"What about it?"

"I couldn't help notice there's a lot of empty space in the units. Why weren't those bodies laid out here with the others?"

"The freezers are for viewing. Nobody's going to claim the bodies from the end room."

"How do you know?"

"We just know."

She'd been hustling me out of the morgue and into the reception area. I stopped and turned around. I didn't like being nudged.

"I'm asking you a polite question," I said, and I did the glare thing. This time it worked.

"They won't be claimed because they probably don't have relatives here. And if they did, the relatives wouldn't be brave enough to come to collect them. By law we have to hold the bodies for ten days. Then we cremate them. We have a monk at the center. They get a decent sending off. Better than they deserve, most of them."

"But who are they?" I pushed.

"They're Burmese."

'They're Burmese,' she said. Like they were windscreen debris in fire-ant season. Then she kicked me out 'cause she knew she wouldn't be getting any money out of me. Nasty little bitch."

Lieutenant Chompu sat opposite me, smoking a joint. He was wearing a white silk ankle-length dressing gown and probably nothing else. I didn't ask. He was elegant rather than handsome. There was something early Duke of Edinburgh about his looks. But he was unashamedly effeminate. Gay men seemed to flock to me. Chompu had his official police barrack room near the Pak Nam station and this, a single bedroom bungalow with a nice view of Pitak Island. Here he lived his other life. Family money had prodded him as far as lieutenant in the Royal Thai police force, but that was where his career had stalled. His refusal to act like a good, manly cop-just pretend a little-had seen him dumped here at the end of nowhere. We were both refugees from real life, and we were friends of a sort.

"It's their fault," he said in one of those high-pitched don't-try-to-speak-while-you're-inhaling-ganja voices.

"Whose?"

"The Burmese."

"For what?"

"All those years when they were totally nasty to us. All those rude invasions and mass murders. It all comes back to haunt you in the end."

"Oh, right. Like we didn't rape and pillage the neighbors too. It was a primeval hobby. They didn't have football in those days. And I think there's a statute of limitations on exacting revenge. Chom, they're just trying to make a living wage."

"They can't have everything, dear. If they want to be spared abuse, nobody's forcing them to come here."

He lay back on his cushion-strewn chaise longue, posing for some unseen photo shoot. The gusts whipped beetle-nut fronds against the glass of his picture window.

"Oh, good," I said, and sipped my lemon juice. "That's a relief. There I was thinking you had no faults."

"And I do?"

"You're a racist pig."

"It has nothing to do with racism. Are they here to help develop our country? Noooo. Do they try to learn our language and assimilate? Noooo. They come solely because on this side of the border they can make three times what they could in Burma."

"And three times what they could earn in Burma still doesn't equal our minimum wage. They're slave labor, and they're doing all the jobs we refuse to take on. If it weren't for the Burmese, there'd be no fishing industry in Thailand, no palm oil or rubber, a greatly reduced tourism…"

"Oh, Jimm. You know how my eyes puff up when I cry. It's my day off. Can't we talk about boy bands?…Making souffle?…Anything but Burmese."

"I'm angry."

"I know you are, darling. But don't forget, just four days ago you couldn't give a titty about the state of our slave laborers, just like the rest of us."

"I…I didn't know four days ago."

"Know what?"

"That we were exploiting them."

"Of course you did."

"Did not. I just looked it up at the Internet cafe yesterday. Exploitation-Burmese-Thailand. Forty-six thousand sites."

He took a deep toke and blew a little cloud of heaven out of each nostril. I had no problem with ganja, but there were times when I needed to be mellow and times when I wanted to lead with my animosity.

"Jimm," he said. "When you lived in Chiang Mai, how many of your neighbors had Burmese nannies or maids?"

"Well, a lot, but…"

"And didn't you think it was interesting that they started making breakfast at six and were still there washing the dishes at midnight? What? Did you think they were just showing their love for the kind family that hired them for 120 baht a day? And I doubt they got a day off. They knew if they complained there were plenty more menials available in the refugee camps. Sadly lacking a trade union, those people, don't you think?"

"Well, I'm going to do something."

"Fine. There were two million of them working in Thailand last count. I think you should call them in for a meeting."

"No, we'll do it one at a time-or fractions thereof. Let's begin with the head."

"Oh, my word. I've told you."

"I want it investigated."

"It's been investigated."

"Some fat cop with a lump of dead grass on his head walks down the beach, looks at the victim, and hands him over to the bodysnatching rat brothers. They shake hands and he drives off. Fifteen minutes all told. I'd hardly call that an investigation."

"He filed a report."

"Oh, good. Now we're getting somewhere. Show it to me."

"Hmm. All right."

"Really?"

"No. Not really. Are you insane? I'm hardly going to risk what little I have left of a career by leaking confidential documents to the press."

"You've done worse."

"Not in public."

I sighed and looked him over. And I have to confess that was a peculiar moment. I knew Chompu would sooner mount a faulty electric junction box during a rainstorm than have carnal knowledge of a woman, but there was something really…erotic about him lying there in his silk gown, his tanned muscular legs exposed to the mid-thigh. His hair wet from the shower. I was embarrassed by the emotions dribbling through me.

"I'd let you have sex with me," I said.

He coughed and dropped his joint down among the cushions. He burrowed frantically after it before the entire scatter empire went up in flames. You got to see all his neat little teeth when he laughed, and he did laugh long and hard.

"What on earth for?" he asked at last with his rescued joint between his fingers.

"A reward?" I said.

"You're hilarious, really you are. I'd sooner…"

"I know."

Gay or not, that kind of reaction didn't do a lot for a girl's self-esteem. I don't know what had come over me. I'd never found him even vaguely sexual before. I put it down to the trauma of discovering my mother in flagrante. But, well, if my body didn't tempt him, I suppose all I was left with was blackmail.

"This is such a nice little house," I said. "Hidden from the road by a long winding driveway through the trees."

"I was waiting for this."

"A stash of marijuana and a stack of special magazines. Unauthorized use of handcuffs. Quite a little love nest."

"You wouldn't."

"An anonymous phone call to the major. A late-night raid."

I sat on my balcony with Gogo and Sticky on either side of me, as full of vim and vigor as roadkill. I was attempting to read the photocopy of Lieutenant Egalat (Egg) Wirawot's report on the discovery of a John Doe on Maprao beach. It wasn't War and Peace. Two and a half sheets, all told. It was getting harder to read as the light drained away. If there had been a sun, it would have been setting behind me, but we were in what they call a lull, a word I'd become very familiar with of late. The wind had died completely and the dark clouds were all low and gathering to drench us for the standard twenty minutes. Mair and Arny were running around closing all the windows. You can't say the monsoon season didn't have a sense of humor. I should have been helping the family batten down the hatches, but I'd only just been sent the report and I wanted to know what it said. If fiction awards were presented in the category of police reports, I had the winner right there on my lap.

FOUND THE HEAD-NO DISTINGUISHING MARKS-LONG HAIR, EARRINGS, DARK SKIN-PROBABLY BURMESE-MARKED OFF A PERIMETER AND SCOURED THE BEACH FOR EVIDENCE-INTERVIEWED AND CONSOLED DISTRAUGHT VILLAGERS-BEGAN SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATION AT THE DOCKS-NO COOPERATION FROM THE BURMESE FISHERMEN-CONCLUDED THAT THIS WAS ONE MORE INTERNAL DISPUTE WITHIN THEIR COMMUNITY SETTLED THE WAY THEY DO.

It began.

There were vegetables, but that was the meat of it. The people behind our resort have three cows. Even on a good day when they get bamboo root treats, those cows couldn't produce half the manure I read there in that report. And his nonexistent, in-depth systematic investigation hadn't turned up so much as a name.

The sky all around me grumbled like a troubled stomach, and the cloud-and I swear I'm not making this up-squatted down on our resort like a huge Malay black bear's bottom. Plonked itself right down on top of us. It was so dark I could no longer make out words on the paper. The dogs, a species renowned for its innate sense of predicting extreme weather conditions, snored through it. Only when the rain tossed itself down in zinc bathtubs and the wind rose to smash it sideways against our little huts did they wake up, stretch, and amble off in search of a drier spot. I was halfway inside my room when I noticed Grandad Jah jogging toward me through the deluge. I'd seen video footage of a horse being picked up by a tornado. A horse weighs a thousand times more than my grandad, and I swear his feet weren't touching the ground.

"Grab something solid," I shouted, but my words were whisked away on the wind. It could only be the weight of the rain soaking through his clothes that stopped him flying off like Mary Poppins. He clambered up the steps and pushed past me into the cabin. He had a smile on his face. It didn't suit him. When the door was shut, he started to undress.

"Grandad, don't."

"Pneumonia," he said. "That's what gets us. Lungs full of rain. Sudden chill. Two days and you're on the pyre. Can't be too careful."

"It's not appropriate to…"

But I was too late. His thick soggy shirt was already on the floor, and he was working on the tie string of his fisherman's trousers. Grandad undressing was like a skeleton shedding its ectoplasm. I hurried to the cupboard for a spare blanket and wrapped it around him before I had to witness any more of him.

"What do you want, Grandad?"

"I've got it," he said, his daringly small underpants falling to the floor beneath the blanket.

"I'm sure you have. What is it?"

"The number."

"What num- The engine?"

He grinned.

"But how? It wasn't there last night," I reminded him.

Me and Grandad had crept out under the cover of the crashing surf the previous night and broken into the Honda. We'd left no traces. Grandad Jah was the Ali Baba of grand theft auto. But our clandestine operation beneath the bonnet had only succeeded in confirming that the couple had gone to great lengths not to be traced. The engine number had been filed away to nothing.

"There are ways," he said.

"To read a number that's not there?"

"To read the ghost of that number, young Jimm. When a number is punched onto metal, the metal below it is hardened. Even when the surface is filed level, that hard metal retains the number. By cleaning off the grease with petrol and applying heat from a blowtorch, then by grinding down the area with emery paper and working up a fine shine, with a strong side light you can pick out the relief of the original numbers."

The rain was beating so hard on the concrete tile roof that Grandad had been forced to shout the end of his explanation. Then, within a minute, the storm was gone, and the rays of the setting sun found a loophole in the convoluted clouds and formed a halo around him. He looked like the starving Buddha. He was, without question, an arrogant, ignorant, genius.

"How are the preparations going?"

"I'm getting wigs made."

"What for?"

"For my head."

"I know where they go," I said. "I'm asking you why you need them. Did you accidently exfoliate all your hair off?"

Sissi was trying to be cool, but I'd known her long enough to sense the girlish excitement in her voice. This gala would be the best thing to happen to post-depression Sissi.

"There'll be three days of mingling," she said. "Participants set up stands with blown-up photos of themselves pre- and post-work. The judges-me being a distinguished foreign judge responsible for grooming and make-up-go around and talk with the contestants. They're gorgeously challenged, and here they are naked without their Photoshop tools. There's no time to rush out for plastic surgery, so all they have are grooming and makeovers to be the belles and beaux they aspire to be. And nobody's allowed to be their finished Web Idol until the ball. That's when everyone goes glam. Cinderellas and Charmings all. And I have to be especially gorgeous, as I'm such an icon."

"Hence the wigs."

"I'll leave it till the last moment to decide which Sissi I shall be."

It was perverted but so much better than self-imposed imprisonment in a luxury condominium.

"I want to see all the photos," I said.

"There's just the one problem," she said.

"What's that, Siss?"

"I have to pass through Bangkok."

"Wear a mask."

"No, I mean the demonstrations."

A pause here to explain what was going down in our nation's capital. For a month, an army of yuppies with undisguised connections to the aristocracy and the military had been occupying our government house. Had they been merely motorcycle taxi drivers and papaya salad vendors, they would, and some would argue, should, have been mowed down in a barrage of police gunfire. These quiche-eating miserables were making a mockery of our political system. A system, I may add, that had no problem making a mockery of itself. But what these yellow shirts represented made them bulletproof. A baton to the head of any one of them would have left a dent in the kingdom's heritage. So those arrogant yuppies strolled through police lines and set up a holiday resort at that Italo-gothic mansion in Dusit.

Meanwhile, the rightful residents sneaked out the back gate. Led by the brother-in-law of the ex-PM-telecommunications tsar who'd threatened to make us Thailand Inc., the government jumped on the bus and skedaddled out to our old airport at Don Muang. There they were currently conducting the business of running the country in a room behind left luggage. It was all so humiliating I wanted to apply for Lao citizenship. At least the Lao had a nice oligarchy where everyone knew where the lines were drawn.

But that was why my sister Sissi was wary of passing through our hotbed of anarchy and anti-anarchy.

"Come on, Siss." I laughed. "You fly domestic to our brand-new airport at Suvarnabhumi. You travel along the moving walkways to your transit gate, and you flash your first-class documents at the smiling Thai Airways official who whisks you off to the first-class lounge. There you drink complimentary champagne until you're led onto the aircraft. You don't even have to leave the airport. You'll be oblivious to all that violent Ping-Pong and popcorn-making that's going on in Dusit. And, I mean, I doubt very much whether those coffee shop entrepreneurs and middle-aged ladies with expensive perms will be marching out to the airport to throw themselves down in front of your jumbo. You really do worry too much."

"You're right."

"I usually am. Now, to business."

"Why do you never phone me just to say hello?"

"Sorry. Hello! Now, Grandad and I were wondering whether you'd be kind enough to trace a car engine number. It's a Honda B15B9009554."

"I stopped doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Engaging in illegal activities on the Internet."

"No you didn't."

"I did."

"When?"

"A week ago. I have a loving public now. I'm adored. I don't want to endanger my standing. I want my awesome power to be used for good instead of evil."

"You can't be serious."

"I am."

I was devastated. Sissi of all people going straight.

"Well, then. This isn't technically illegal," I tried. "It's just accessing public information."

"It's hacking into the databank of an international company and stealing."

"All right, it's a little bit illegal. But no more illegal than pretending to be the Disney Corporation and having agencies send you baksheesh so their clients get first crack at a new script."

"I don't do that anymore."

"And what are you living on?"

"Savings."

"All ill-gotten."

"When it runs out, I'll get an honest job."

"And what could be more honest than crime fighting? Your awesome power already put one murderer out of business. You're the Sherlock Holmes of cyberspace. Legless Elena your alter ego is the heroine of the Police Beat law enforcers' social network."

"It's a dating site for ex-cops and old hookers."

"Ex-cops with a hundred lifetimes of policing experience. You have a world of detection at your fingertips. There's no end to what you and the old doughnut guys can achieve.

Forget make-up tips for teenyboppers. Join me in the fight for justice and fair play."

"No."

Waste of a speech.

"Please."

"What did he do?"

"Who?"

"The car owner."

I told Sissi about our mystery guests in hut three. When I'd finished, there was a pause, during which I knew she was nodding her head. I could hear her seashell earrings jangling. She could no sooner pass up a mystery than I could.