Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Eighteen

Three weeks had passed. The deckchair insurgents were repainting and decorating Government House in sunshine and mimosa tones. They’d planted rice in the ornamental ponds. They were not fooled by the subterfuge of replacing the drinking buddy of the wicked satellite dish czar with the czar’s brother-in-law. So they dug themselves in and began evening classes in the art of producing Ping-Pong ball smoke bombs. The country trembled at their awesome power.

The monsoons weren’t far away, but nobody knew when they’d arrive. Captain Kow said the locals could no longer predict the weather. He said there’d been a time when every fisherman could read the signs: when the crabs left the sand, how high the beetles built their nests on the trees, when the terns migrated. But now they’d all listen to the radio like the city folk. The world was messed up. And if there were storms coming, the sea wasn’t giving anything away. It was almost impossible that such a vast body of water could be so polite. I could hear the hushed whispers of the embarrassed tide arriving and departing on the fine gravel. “I’m here, shhh.”

“No, I’m over here, shhh.” Then a long empty pause before the next whispers. I admired the vastness of the scene all around me and remained in awe that I could make out the join where sea met sky. You never actually saw the horizon in Chiang Mai. You thought you did, then one day the dirty air would clear and there’d be a hulking great range of mountains looming up in front of you. But in Maprao with the Gulf stretching deceptively away from you, you knew that line — the one you had to stretch your neck to see all of, left and right — that was the edge of the world. You could sit on your back balcony and watch a hurricane pass over Cambodia, see giant cruise ships shrivel to nothing, view the creamy pink sunrise a whole continent away.

Something had changed inside me. I began to understand why everyone within a twenty-kilometer radius was an idiot. It was for the same reason that you could live in a condominium room for years and not know that your next door neighbor was stacking body parts in his refrigerator. Ignorance breeds ignorance. If you want the world to be as narrow as your mind, you can make it so. I’d assumed I was superior to everyone in Maprao so I hadn’t seen a need to confirm my status by actually talking to people. The odd thing was, once you got to know them you realized there was more common sense around you than in a whole city full of educated but suffocating people. Certainly more than in a barrel-load of monkey politicians. Living their lives wasn’t desperation for the Mapraoans, it was a sensible choice for a very proud people.

I was a celebrity for a while. We had three national TV stations down here interviewing me about my role in solving the abbot’s killing. The event might have slipped by unnoticed but for the bizarre demise of Mika Mikata. The self-filmed video of her suicide was on automatic feed to her Web site, and its popularity on YouTube was unprecedented. Mikata had no intention of being taken alive. With her chest-mounted cameras and her spectacular orange hat, she was dispatched by jet-propelled hang-glider to the top platform of the Tokyo Tower, the world’s tallest orange structure. There, she gave a heartrending but virtually incomprehensible speech and flung herself over the parapet. Viewers were able to make out the strains of ‘Killing Me Softly’, in Japanese, as she somersaulted through the air. But, as both the still and video cameras were destroyed as she bounced off the overhanging observation deck, her actual death was not recorded, which would have been a major disappointment to her fans. However, live coverage or not, Mika Mikata’s death had been as colorful as her murders.

My articles on the investigation and subsequent discovery of the killer were very well received. I even had a spread in Matichon Weekly magazine. I had offers of full-time positions I would have been a fool to pass up. I received personal calls from managing editors at newspapers that made the Mail look like a rag. Oh, I considered them. I had sleepless nights. On numerous occasions, I dialed all but the last digit of their phone numbers. But…well, we had a business to run. Our sleeping province, momentarily awoken with a kiss from the angel of death, had decided to press the snooze button and go back to sleep again. I spent less time scouring the newspapers and more time gutting mackerel. With the absence of intrigue, I was able to put more time and effort into our resort. The shop attendance had rocketed to an average of seven customers per day. With Gaew’s help, Arny had almost doubled the room occupancy from one per five-day period to one-point-seven by the simple addition of a sign: LAST BED AND FOOD FOR 100 KMS. It wasn’t exactly true, or rather it was an outright lie, but any travelers silly enough to find themselves on these back roads late at night were unlikely to sue us later. Arny had also written to Lonely Planet for inclusion in their 2010 edition. It was a bit like me writing to Mr. Pulitzer asking if I might put my name on his list, but I admired my brother’s spirit.

And me? I cooked. I began what one day might be called a garden. And I fed the dogs. Yes, that was a plural. Sticky Rice pulled through. He woke up one day like a born-again canine with the kick of a small cow and has hardly dared to go back into that sleep world since. I assume my ankle was the first thing he saw when he came around because he follows it so closely I have to wipe snot off my leg after each trip through the yard. It’s rather pathetic but endearing and, I confess, I might have found myself cuddling him from time to time but only while he’s in rehab. Gogo continues to glare at me with disdain and maintains her orbit.

What else have I been doing? Nothing, I suppose. Oh, yes. I did come up with a solution for the mystery of the interred VW. The world would never hear of it and the story didn’t even warrant a follow-up in Thai Rat. Readers have short attention spans and the effort of retelling the tale was beyond the editors. But my inner diva has started to write it into a screenplay for Clint. It’ll be a sensation. Although the police had given up on the case, I was determined to keep it alive. I’d done all the flow charts and brainstorms and reviewed all the evidence and I found myself up against a brick wall. There was only one thing I knew for sure: that the couple in the interred VW were not the couple who had been asked to give evidence against Tan Sugit. There was, however, a very impressive list of things I didn’t know. I didn’t know where the first VW had disappeared to after its brief stay in the police parking lot, who rented the second VW and where they went, how evil Auntie Chainawat was involved and why she sold that strip of land to Old Mel, how the VW got itself buried, or anything else. Because, to tell the truth, at that stage I knew nothing. I can’t say it didn’t worry me but I’d literally run out of avenues to pursue. Sissi had searched the Internet and delved into the private briefs of one or two senior policemen but she’d come up with nothing relevant. I could have left it there, I suppose, but for the memory of the driver and his girlfriend sitting calmly in their seats. There were families somewhere ever wondering what had become of their loved ones. What about their spirits? I know. It doesn’t sound like me, does it? But all that hanging around in temples…well, something has to rub off.

One annoying phrase that kept replaying in my mind was what the old Chinese lady had said the day I asked her why she’d sold her land. Even after I edited her bad Thai in my mind, it still sounded like a second-rate martial-arts movie line: “People who connect the past and the future may know the present.” I’d thought about heading back over to Ranong and beating the meaning out of her with a baseball bat, but that was on one of our very rare red meat days.

So, I began with the past. What I knew already was that, before the bridge was built across the neck of the estuary, all the land around here had been underdeveloped. Before the prawn farms there were still mangroves and much of the landscape was still covered in a thick layer of natural vegetation. Huge tracts of land were bought up by local Chinese speculators who waited for the inevitable march of time. There were no paved roads and the only settlements were to be found on the coast. The coconut and palm plantations had yet to arrive. When they did, Old Mel was one of the pioneers and I needed to imagine what the countryside was like when his family moved in.

The land office was one of a huddle of simple government buildings around the Lang Suan stadium (capacity twelve thousand — mostly standing). The office was another bruised edifice that begged not to be painted white again. Anyone could stroll up to the second floor and take a look at the square-meter plans that sketched out the allotments and their boundaries. The two plots I was searching for were clearly marked with the current borders. I could see how they fitted into the overall land-grab mosaic. If I’d so wished, I could have asked for the names of any of the neighboring owners and been given contact details. The land department did all it could to encourage the sale and resale of its dirt.

In a back room were large cardboard rolls that contained older and older versions of these plans. By digging deep, I made my way to 1980 where I found the land before its sale by the Chainawats, separated at the original border. There were two interesting differences in the surrounding plots. One was that the parcels were very much larger. The land demons hadn’t yet begun to slice and dice their plots and sell them at extortionate prices. Two was the anomaly that almost all of the land divisions had remained faithful to one long continuous border, as if someone had drawn a random uneven line across the map and told everyone they were to keep to one side of it or the other. I asked the clerk why this was but she was young and more interested in her fingernails. She suggested I take a look at the geological maps of the region.

My quest led me to Professor Woot Juntasa at the department of geology of Mae Jo University. This was a pretty but minor campus of the mother Mae Jo in Chiang Mai and whenever I’d passed by, it had always seemed to be unoccupied. The day of my visit was no exception. I walked from building to building looking for somebody to guide me to the professor’s study. The first human I found was the portly professor himself. His face was a shiny red mask that hinted at either too much field work in the midday sun or eczema. Either way I got the feeling he would have been happier at a campus in Scandinavia. Even under the full Finnish blast from his air-conditioning, his armpits were still forging through some tropical jungle. His eyebrows were too high on his forehead and it made all his expressions ones of surprise.

He seemed truly delighted to have something to do of more substance than teaching soil erosion to bored undergraduates. I told him about the region I was interested in and he smiled that knowing smile of an expert. He told me that not only did he have large-scale area maps of the Lang Suan river basin, he also had aerial photographs that I might find amusing. He launched off into a description of the region from the Paleolithic period and we retired to a small meeting room where he spread his maps out across the table.

“Perhaps you could point out exactly the terrain you’re interested in?” he said.

It wasn’t so easy without the labeled plot boundaries, but I was able to locate Old Mel’s land from the bend in the river and the relief lines of the Wat Ny Kow cliffs. Professor Woot laid a sheet of clear plastic over the map and I used a whiteboard pen to give an approximation of the two plots.

“Aha!” he said. It was that Sherlock Holmes moment when all becomes clear. “You know? This is a truly fascinating area. For the longest time, most of it was nong nam, a type of marshland. Water seeped into it from the river in the rainy season, so for three months a year it was bog. The reason the plots you mention have a regimented common border is that there was once a channel running through it known as a distributary, an offshoot of the main river.”

He led me to the government survey photographs.

“These,” he said, “were taken in early nineteen sixty. Here, you can clearly see the stream cutting through what was then largely wilderness. It was when this branch of the Lang Suan River overflowed that the land all around here flooded.”

“Then how does an entire stream disappear?” I asked.

“Sometimes it’s natural due to erosion,” he said. “But in the case of the Lang Suan, it was a result of dredging. The larger fishing companies wanted to transport their catch directly to Lang Suan city so it could be shipped faster to Bangkok. The sand and silt they dug up was dumped along the banks. There was no accountability. If enough money changes hands you can get away with any amount of abuse of the environment. And matters haven’t improved, I’m sad to say.”

“So the silt blocked the mouth of the branch stream?”

“Exactly. It dried up.”

“And suddenly all that ex-bog land increased in value.”

“Right again. And I doubt that was unplanned. A little bit of pre-knowledge and the buying up of marshland for almost nothing.”

This didn’t make sense.

“But there is no dried stream bed between the two plots of land I’m referring to,” I said.

“Of course not. Not now. Not since the storm surge of seventy-eight.”

“What’s a storm surge?”

“It’s a sort of underwater mini tsunami that arrives with a storm. But rather than materializing as a huge wave above the water, it’s actually a force that pushes up from the sea shelf as it arrives at the coast. Some surges can cause the tide to rise three meters or more. The water level rises gradually but dramatically. During the surge of seventy-eight the sea level was above that of the river for a long period. The water flowing down the river was confronted by the sea attempting to go the opposite way. There was terrible flooding and a maelstrom of mud and debris. Up in Lang Suan many people lost their homes and many were washed away in the flooding. The surge lasted for no longer than an hour but two hundred and sixty hectares were inundated.

“There was a national outcry as there always is. Once the river ran low the land barons put pressure on the authorities to conduct a new dredging and reinforce the banks. They commissioned engineers to ensure that the freak conditions of seventy-eight wouldn’t affect their investments again. By the time the new levee was created and the land dried out, the old stream had disappeared completely, filled in by the mud and the silt.”

So, the land Chainawat sold to Old Mel had once been the bed of a stream that had branched out from the Lang Suan River. But what advantage would there be in selling it to him? The answer to that also came from my ruddy professor.

“Every year during the monsoons Lang Suan floods,” he said. “No matter what precautions they take, concrete banks, overflow tanks…none of it works. And the simple reason is that the river takes too long to find its way to the sea. In two thousand and two a proposal was put forward to dig a distributary to relieve the pressure on the main river and allow it to drain faster. The geological researchers discovered that there was a natural course which was the cheapest and most logical outlet: the stream running behind your Koon Mel’s plantation. Landowners had appropriated the river land illegally. There would be no recourse for compensation.”

I smiled and rolled back on my secretary chair. The cunning old witch. Granny Chainawat had somehow acquired a copy of the engineering report and knew there was every possibility she’d have a canal cut through the rear of her land. Before the announcement was made, she’d sold it. Three hectares of land from a cache of fourteen thousand. How tight-arsed can you get?

There wasn’t a fleet of VW Kombis in the south of Thailand in 1978; in fact there may have been just the two. One, that driven by Sugit’s hippy daughter, vanished in the south. The other? Well, as far as we know, the other was rented by the dead couple. I’d never be able to prove it but I had my theory as to what happened to those flower children. They were as happy with the Kombi as two bees in a sugared almond box. They were driving their prize north for the handover as they’d done a few times before. But this was different. This was free and easy lifestyle driving. They were young, in search of experiences, beauty, love. Looking for the wildness that they were sure lay in their souls. They’d kept to the coast road on their drive north to avoid police checkpoints on the highway. They’d missed the turnoff at La Mae and the paved roads turned into slithery clay. They should have turned back but the views were dramatic in the storms. Their hearts were thumping with exhilaration. This was excitement for two kids from the city who’d lived all their thrills through movies. The clay turned to deep mud and rock and there was no way they could cross the Lang Suan this close to the estuary. They turned back inland and decided to stop, wait it out, ride the storms.

I’d pump it up in the screenplay and put in a few gritty moments for Eastwood, but this is the way it played in my mind:

EXT. DIRT ROAD — DAY

PIP and DOOM are in the front seats of a VW Kombi driving into another deluge. The wipers can barely compete. The road is as wild as the choppy sea but they seem oblivious to the conditions. Doom has her hand on her man’s thigh as he drives and they smile as the big tin beast crashes through each wall of water. She giggles nervously. The wheels spin and slither and they lurch from side to side. Then, suddenly, they arrive at the bank of a ferocious river and skid to a dramatic halt centimeters before dropping off the bank. FADE TO EXT. MID RIVER — LATER

We focus on a colorful carved wooden rocking horse that is being buffeted along on the river current like a raft on a rapid. We think it can never stay afloat on the torrent as it bucks and dips below the surface but the horse’s head returns to the surface. Then, something bewildering happens. The water in the river, once raging, first slows, and then stops flowing. For a few tense seconds, the horse floats in an impossible void as calm as a puddle. In the distance, on the bank of the river, is the VW van. The rain has stopped and the setting sun has found a crack in the clouds and is bathing the scene in a surreal orange glow. And the wooden horse, which had been slowly circling, suddenly begins to float back in the direction from which it had come. And the river water level rapidly climbs the bank like a time-lapse film of tides. But the couple in the VW is oblivious to all this. All is calm now. They are smoking ganja and staring in awe at the sun’s marvelous color show. Our soundtrack is Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ and it plays throughout. It plays as the riverbank crumbles and the conflicting currents begin their battle midstream. The river becomes a cauldron of threatening debris. The disaster is sudden and dramatic. The riverbank is swept away at its most vulnerable point like a sand wall. The VW lurches and drops suddenly into a deluge of water that bursts through the bank upon which they’re parked. Fear on the faces of our protagonists turns to excitement as the van stays upright and is washed at speed away from the river. They struggle to attach their seat belts. Dipping and turning. Pip and Doom ride it like passengers on a funfair attraction, screaming with excitement and terror. The ultimate trip. The van comes to a sudden, jarred halt. They’re under water but the water level inside has only reached their waists. They’re safe. We see their look of relief and completeness. Doom reaches to release her seat belt but there’s a long groaning metallic creak all around them and the sliding door is popped off its rail by the pressure of the outside water. In under a second the van is full and we know the couple won’t be seeing any more sunsets. FADE TO EXT. MID RIVER — LATER

We are under water approaching the van from the outside. The torrent has passed and through the windscreen we see Doom and Pip still in their seats with a surprising expression of tranquility on their faces.