Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Five

“It was Monday the seventeenth of June, 1978,” Mair began. “The second time I lost my virginity.”

Arny and I looked up from our squid fried rice, our spoons in mid-air. Granddad Jah continued to eat, either because he’d heard it all before, or he hadn’t heard it this time. I wasn’t sure I wanted Mair to continue, not over dinner.

“I was at the temple again today,” I said. It was the first thing that entered my head. I hadn’t planned on sharing news of my discreet investigation but this seemed like a good time.

“His name was Krit,” Mair pressed on.

“Why didn’t you say?” Arny asked. “I could have given you a ride.”

“Because I thought arriving on a bicycle wouldn’t alert anyone. And look at me, I’m already a kilo lighter and I’ve only been riding for a week. A month of this and I’ll be modeling bikinis.”

“He was very good looking,” Mair said.

When we were younger we’d let go of the leash and allow Mair to run wild with her stories. We’d travel with her through her confusing history. Her accounts often fizzled and died without a punchline or a point but we’d encourage her in hope that one day she might mention our father. But she never did.

“Mair, I’m telling a true story here,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

I hoped I’d be able to distract her long enough to forget her second virginity anecdote. I told them about the attack on the guard and the abbot’s arrest and the dogs and the cigarette lighter. Arny listened spellbound as he always had to my stories. Mair waited patiently for a gap. Then, to my surprise, Granddad Jah drank a swallow of water and stared at me, eye to eye like he was about to put a curse on me. Then he said:

“He was looking for something.”

Granddad Jah had spent forty years in the Royal Thai police force and never made it beyond police corporal, traffic division. I’d often considered there were those who were natural policemen, who climbed the ranks and passed exams and landed on a perch that was just a flutter above their ability. Then there were those who had money and could buy their promotions all the way to the top. Then there were people like Granddad Jah who just didn’t have a clue. Like, I really needed advice from a traffic cop.

“Who was?” I asked, just for the rare experience of engaging my grandfather in conversation.

“Abbot Winai’s killer,” he said.

Of course I’d considered this possibility. If this were a crime novel, every reader, even the educationally challenged ones, would have shouted, “HE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING.” Thank you, Granddad.

“Well, if he found what he was looking for we’ll never know what it was,” I said. End of story.

“Maybe they had CCTV cameras,” said Arny, never the most astute of the litter. He had visions of a world where every street, every house, every tree was covered by closed circuit cameras. Every crime could be solved by replaying the tapes — something like England.

“Arny, little brother, I — ”

“He didn’t.”

Granddad was getting annoying.

“Didn’t what, Granddad?”

“He didn’t find what he was looking for.”

“What makes you think that?”

“There was a thick cloud cover last night. No moon to see by. He didn’t dare use a torch ‘cause it would have been seen for miles. All he had was his cigarette lighter and he used that till he ran out of fluid. He didn’t find what he was looking for.”

“Granddad Jah” — I tried to filter out the condescension — “the lighter could be anybody’s. It could have been dropped there a month ago.”

“Ha,” said Granddad. “You don’t spend much time in temples, obviously. The novices are out at first light with their long straw brooms and their litter spikes. Then all the widows come with their food donations and they’re on their hands and knees picking up rubbish. And then, just two days ago the place is crawling with detectives looking at a murder scene. Even the idiots they have in the CSD these days would have spotted a lighter. No, girl, the lighter arrived after all that. It was dropped there last night. It belonged to the killer and he’ll be back.”

He took his plate and dropped it in the washing up bowl and left. I was astounded that Granddad knew so many words. That was the most we’d heard him say since before Granny died. And, I’ll give him credit, it wasn’t such a bad point, either.

“Can I finish my story now?” Mair asked.

“Go ahead, Mair,” I said. “But I warn you, Granddad’s was a tough act to follow.”

“His name was Krit,” she said.

“Was that before Dad?” I asked.

“He was very good looking but he was a bastard. He was a lecturer at the university. He got one of his students pregnant and pretended he knew nothing about it. Don’t forget those were the days before DMZ.”

“DNA, Mair.”

“Before any of that. So, there was no evidence. No proof. But I knew the girl and believed her. Krit used to come into our shop and I cornered him one day. I told him I was a virgin and I wanted my first time to be with a real man, not one of the boys on campus. I wanted a man who knew what girls expected.”

There’s something squalid about sitting around the dinner table listening to your mother telling sex stories, but she had a way of making the dirtiest anecdote sound like a fairy tale. Arny and I were twelve again. We smiled at each other and nodded for her to continue.

“I was a little older than his usual taste but I was petite enough to get away with it, particularly in my borrowed CMU uniform. I arranged to meet him late one night at the Little Duck Hotel just in front of campus. I even booked a room. I was already inside when he arrived. I asked him to go and take a shower. By the time he came out I’d turned off the light. He could just see me under the sheet by the light from the bathroom. I told him to turn that off as well. I think he liked the dominant type. I told him I was completely naked and asked him to remove his towel and I heard it drop to the floor. That’s when I screamed. The door flew open, the light came on and three students from the campus photographic club rushed in with their flash cameras and took pictures of me and him running around in our birthday suits in a state of panic. It was such fun.

“For a month, photographs of Professor Krit appeared on telegraph poles and trees all around the campus. Only his head was missing. I have to say that once the raid had taken place, the poor man shriveled to almost nothing, so the photographs were terribly embarrassing. We’d written captions such us, ‘Do you know who this little fellow belongs to?’ and ‘Who is the little boy lecturer chasing this time?’ Of course you only saw parts of me in the photos. I had a very pleasant body back then but that didn’t mean I wanted everyone to see it, did it? As the month progressed, the photos showed more and more of Krit until it was obvious it wouldn’t be long before everyone on campus got to see his face. As we expected, the pregnant student was approached by a third party who agreed that everything would be ‘taken care of’, including a tidy sum in compensation. Once the taking care of was taken care of and the money safely deposited, I could see no reason to play the game anymore.”

“You stopped putting up the photographs?” Arny guessed.

“Goodness, no. I stopped cutting off the head. It had been a mystery for several weeks, you see? You can’t leave people dangling in mid-air, can you?”

We didn’t care whether it was true or not. Like most of Mair’s stories, we just appreciated it for the piece of art that it was. I was at the sink washing dishes and Mair came up behind me and put her arms round my waist. I loved the feel of her so close. I had to keep reminding myself she was in my bad books.

“That was a very good dinner, child,” she said. “I don’t know where you get all your skills from. Not from me, that’s sure.”

“With fresh produce you can make anything taste good.”

I sounded like an infomercial, but it was true. One of the few good things about living far from civilization was that you got to sample foodstuff before the chemistry lab laid hands on it. A few hours earlier, our dinner had been swimming blissful circles in a largely unpolluted sea, and chillies grew everywhere like weeds. The eggs were still warm from…well, you know where eggs come from. And you’d just reach out the window and grab a papaya. I had a small tented garden that might one day produce vegetables. Once you became self-sufficient you could say with authority where everything on your plate came from. Which couldn’t be said for the plastic container I’d come across in the freezer.

“Mair, what was that stew-like substance I found in the fridge?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, and gave me an ‘oh oh’ moment.

“That murky gray-green melted ice-cream-looking stuff.”

“Don’t touch that,” she said, and released me from her motherly embrace. “It’s a broth the woman at the petrol pump gave me to try.”

“We could have it for dinner tomorrow.”

“No. No, we won’t. She’s an awful cook. I took it just to be polite.”

And with that she left me to do the dishes by myself. Once everything was clean and stowed, I walked down to the beach. Gogo tagged along twenty meters behind me. If the moon was full as the calendar would have it, the clouds were so thick you’d never know it. Granddad Jah was right. The squid-boat lamps formed a sparkling chain along the sea line. It was like looking at the far bank of a wide river. I walked along the sinking sand until I reached one of Arny’s coconut tree logs. I sat with my back against it admiring the green and white cat’s eyes that blinked at me from the horizon. Gogo strolled past me, turned two circles, then lay on the sand with her back to me. She was about two meters away. As usual, she pretended I wasn’t there. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I clambered across to her and patted her — twice. There was no reaction. It didn’t matter. I only did it in case she turned up with froth in her mouth the following morning. At least then she’d have sampled a brief moment of intimacy with my name on it.

It had occurred to me very early in my incarceration in this colorless circus that I was slowly becoming a traditional Thai woman: regressing, slipping back through time to an age before cable and cappuccino. I looked myself up in one of those old ‘Understanding Thailand’ books for foreigners. Why was it, I wondered, that these books were always written by Western men, usually British, who professed to know us better than we knew ourselves?

I didn’t know the people in those books. I’ve never looked like any of the charming women in the photographs. Last year I wouldn’t have found mention of myself in them at all. I was born into an era that is rapidly freeze-drying and shrinkwrapping our culture, distorting it through Western and Eastern influences. I grew up dressing like Winona Ryder and listening to Bon Jovi. My mother was a Beatles fan. My second cousin’s girl is fourteen. She has dyed light-brown hair that stands up like a cartoon look of surprise, and she wears her jeans well below the belly button. All her heroes are Korean. So tell me, what is a typical Thai woman in 2008?

She’d be around 120–130 centimeters (I’m a palm print short of that range). She certainly wouldn’t wear flip-flops to go shopping, eschew the positive effects of cosmetics or consider dark skin to be more attractive than that of the cadaver-white actresses on television. She’d have a collection of cute e-mail emoticons larger than her spoken vocabulary but still have dreams to go to live in a foreign land. If the polls are to be believed, she would have experimented with booze, drugs ^and?_or sex before she reached fifteen. She’d wear her hair long because men preferred long hair and, heaven knows, our only purpose for being on the planet is to flutter our tail feathers and snare us a mate. Sissi might argue that I’m only talking about modern gals in big cities but I know for a fact the mentality goes all the way down the food chain to the smallest village.

So where do I fit exactly? I’m thirty-four. I have the type of face that looked adorable on a twelve-year-old but that will pucker like an old peach by the time I reach fifty. I wear my hair short. I have small but whimsical breasts and a little pot belly that makes me look four months pregnant when I sit at the computer. I’m moody for long periods either side of that inconvenient time of the month — two weeks on either side. In fact, I’ve never seen what it is in me that attracts, not a deluge to be true, but a steady drizzle of male interest. Perhaps the boys’ mothers taught them what a nice homely girl should look like. “Get a housewife in the kitchen, then go find yourself something sexy, son.”

But suddenly there are shadows of me between the pages of the Thai Female chapter. I’m slowly becoming charming, heaven help me. Since we moved south, I’ve been forced into a state of politeness, returning smiles from people I don’t know and making conversation. In Chiang Mai I could walk around in a non-seeing social trance. I’d never find time to cook, shop, garden or feed livestock, but suddenly that’s my life. And here, although I dread to say it, I feel inferior to men. They can all cut down trees and drag heavy nets full of fish and dig wells and tap rubber and build. And all I can do is gut fish, and I learned how to do that on YouTube.

This had been one interesting day. It had begun with a death and ended with a tale of revenge. It concerned me that Mair should choose that particular night to tell that particular story. If she’d been capable of humiliating a professor when her mind was still in reasonable working order, I wondered what her unfastened self might think suitable for a dog killer. It was time for me to keep a close eye on my mother.

I was woken early the next morning by the steel drum version of ‘Mamma Mia’ on my mobile phone. We were five kilometers from the nearest landline but some communications billionaire had acupunctured our country with cell phone towers. I could see the nearest from my window, its regal rust-orange beauty marred only by the unsightly mountain view behind it. The call was from my former colleague, Dtor. She was breathless to tell me that our Government House had been invaded by old yuppies in yellow shirts overnight. Politics used to be a lot more complicated before the recent introduction of the English Premiership system of colored shirts which helped no end to know who was who. The yellows, headed by a media magnate and backed discreetly by the military, were locked in battle with the red shirts, mostly from the north, backed by an ex-football-club owner, ex-prime-minister, ex-telecommunications czar, ex-policeman currently in exile. It was a matter of time before we got the black and white stripe and the large pink polka dot factions. I kept thinking, “If you could just give them a ball…”

According to Dtor, during the night, the yellow shirts had strolled through police lines, staged a bloodless takeover of our seat of power and changed the curtains. The Bangkok middle classes had revolted. It might help to think of it like the Richard Branson party staging a sit-in at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Couldn’t happen, right? That’s what I’d thought. But there they were. Thai politics. I’d had the opportunity to switch to the political desk. They’d told me crime wasn’t safe for a wee girl. I fought them out of the idea. The point was, in Thailand, murder and theft and violence were tangible. Politics was all smoke and mirrors and, basically, silly.

What worried me about the situation in Bangkok, apart from the fact we’d be a laughingstock in the world press, was that important things like police inquiries and monk murders and autopsies would no longer be getting any attention. All the policemen would be lined up around Government House in their macho black riot gear. And nobody knew who was in charge. The incumbent prime minister and well-respected television chef was being ousted for cooking on prime time while the country fried around him. Police chiefs were being replaced and dispatched to inactive posts with such regularity that there were more inactive police generals than active ones. So it seemed to me we’d be on our own in Pak Nam for quite some time.

Oh, and one more thing Dtor told me; the head in the plastic bag at the end of a rope? It was a suicide.

My second call of the morning was from Sissi. We had a bit of a chuckle about politics but finally moved on to something serious. The Chinese family, Chainawat, who had sold the land to Old Mel was based in Ranong on the Andaman coast. She gave me an address and several phone numbers for Chainawat Inc. and the personal number for Vicha, the current CEO. The family had, at one time, been involved in a variety of small businesses and investments but had recently amalgamated all their efforts into the fishing and real estate industries. They had some fourteen thousand hectares of land held in speculation in the south and operated a fleet of deep-sea beam trawlers that dragged enormous nets across the seabed and devastated the corals. Good for profits, sorry about the environment. Sissi hadn’t been able to find any other dirt about the company’s holdings but she was still digging.

Blissy Travel, the company mentioned in the ganja papers, was dissolved in the late seventies when the expected tourist boom in the south didn’t happen. Blissy had been set up by a local Surat businessman called Somjit Boondet. He seemed to have vanished after that for twenty-odd years until, in the year 2002, a Somjit Boondej arrived on the business registry as the district manager of the Surat branch of the Home Art Building Accessories Mega Store.

“I see this a lot,” Sissi told me. “These slight inconsistencies in spelling. It could be a legitimate clerical error — happens all the time — but if you’re an old cynic like me you’re more likely to suspect foul play and less likely to be disappointed. I know from experience how easy it is to lose your old ID card and apply for a new one. You slip the typist a thousand baht and her finger skids on the keyboard and, voila, you’re somebody else. Nothing from your past appears on a computer security check. So, I ran a background search using the old spelling, and what do you think I found?”

“Jail?”

“You’re good at this. Songkla Correctional Facility, 1979 to 2002.”

“Ooh, that sounds serious.”

“Manslaughter. Negligent homicide. And do you know why he’d had to serve the complete term? No pardon, no early release for good behavior? Because he killed a tourist couple.”

“What? That’s great. I mean, not for them, but, you know.”

“I knew you’d be pleased.”

“It evidently wasn’t serious enough to get him a criminal murder rap.”

“The prosecutor was certain. He pushed for life.”

“Sissi, you’re…”

“I know.”

The day couldn’t have started any better. Two leads and I hadn’t even started breakfast. I showered and dressed and stepped on Gogo on my way out of the hut. She shrugged as if being stepped on was her lot in life, and fell in behind. I wanted to know why she was sleeping in front of my room but, well, she’s a dog and I didn’t know how to find out. Apart from our five ‘luxury seaside cabanas’ (small conjoined concrete boxes with no refrigerators or ambiance) there were four less luxurious huts off the beach where our family lived. One apiece. According to Kow the squid-boat captain, the way the monsoons were chomping at the coastline every year, it wouldn’t be long before our back cabins were beachside and our cabanas were floating somewhere off the coast of Vietnam.

I didn’t see any movement in the other three huts. I was usually the first one up in the morning but that day Mair was in the shop working on what she called a display. It involved piling sardine cans into pyramids and putting a ribbon on the top. I pointed out that customers were less likely to buy the sardines because they’d be afraid of disturbing the ribbon. She told me that was nonsense.

“Ed came by again,” she said.

“Do I know Ed?”

“He’s the tall man who does the grass.”

He sprang to mind immediately: lanky with big untrustworthy eyes and a mustache that looked stuck on. Far too young.

“And?”

“He was asking about you.”

“Asking what?”

“You know. If you’re single.”

“But you told him, right?”

“Told him…?”

“What I told you to tell any man who starts to ask personal questions.”

“Well, I…”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“I can’t, child. It’s not nice. And you aren’t.”

“Mair, it doesn’t matter whether I am or not. It’s what they believe that counts. Men are worms, maggoty worms. They’ll keep on chewing away on you unless you put a bad taste in their mouths.”

Sometimes metaphors let me down when I need them most.

“He’s a nice boy.”

“I’m sure he is…a boy.”

“It’s not right, child. You’re still young. You should be having fun with men. A bit of a kiss and a cuddle would cheer you up.”

“Mair, do you really want to get into the ‘You need a man’ routine? Because I can play that as well, you know? So, did you tell him or not?”

“I might have said that you weren’t particularly interested in men at the moment.”

“Great. That’s not really the same as saying I’m a lesbian, is it now?”

“All right. I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

“He has his own palm field.”

“Every man and his cow has a palm field. I wouldn’t call it financial security. You need ten hectares just to make enough money to pay the men to come and cut down the berries.”

Mair did her Titanic smile.

“What?” said I.

“It’s nice to see you developing an interest in the local markets,” she said.

I walked behind her, turning over all the tins she’d placed upside down.

“Come on, Mair. We aren’t catering to bats, you know.”

She stopped.

“Your father kept a pet bat.”

Hallelujah. My father, at last. I couldn’t believe he’d snuck in. How was I to react? What should I say not to nudge her off the track?

“What kind of bat?”

“Oh, you know. The usual ugly, hairy little bastard. It used to scare the daylights out of me. He let it stay in the bedroom.”

“What was his name?”

“Oh, I don’t think you need to know that.”

“I meant the bat.”

“Thanom, you know? Like the Field Marshall. Same eyes.”

I leaned on the bat story as heavily as I could. Her memory was intact when it came to Thanom but she skipped around my father with alacrity. I didn’t pursue it. I had my key word now. It was like the trigger hypnotists use to put someone in a trance. I felt I could return to that time and place with Dad just by asking her about bats. Patience. It had taken thirty-four years to get this far.

“I’ve hired a man,” Mair said.

“To do what?”

“He’s a private detective.”

“You hired a…?”

I was astounded. Not so much that Mair had need of one but that in a place like this she’d been able to find one. And when?

“You didn’t say anything last night,” I said.

“I hadn’t hired one then.”

“Mair, I saw you go to bed. How and where did you find yourself a private detective between then and now?”

“Ed the grass man knew somebody.”

“And you’ve contacted him already?”

“Ed stopped by his house on his way home. You’d be surprised how much is going on in Maprao early in the morning. We should all get up earlier.”

“Are you telling me there’s a private detective in Maprao?”

“Meng.”

I dredged through the names I’d heard. It shouldn’t have been that difficult. According to the official register there were five thousand residents in our district but I got the feeling that figure included everyone who’d ever died here. I was sure I’d seen every face there was to see. A couple of hundred at the most.

“Not Meng the plastic awnings man?”

“That’s him.”

“Mair” — I sat on the little stool at my feet — “he’s the plastic awnings man. He attaches plastic awnings. That’s his job.”

“And window shades.”

“Same difference. Tell me, where does he find time in his busy awning schedule to squeeze in private detecting?”

“There isn’t a lot of detective work here.”

“Of course not.” I lowered my voice. “Of course there isn’t a lot of work for a private detective who puts up plastic awnings. Who’s going to hire him?”

“Ed did.”

“Ed the grass man hired Meng the awnings man as a private detective?”

“He said he’s very good.”

I suppose a day that started like this one only had one direction to go.

“What, Mair, did Ed hire a detective to do?”

“To find his wife.”

“Oh, super. Super. You’re trying to fix me up with a married grass man.”

“He’s not married anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because Meng found his wife. She was living with a glazier in Lang Suan. Meng took photographs. They’re divorced now.”

I was exhausted.

“You found this all out this morning?”

“I think we should get up with the sunrise.”

“How much does this private detective awning man charge?”

“He said it’s up to me. I can pay what I like. Whatever I think the information’s worth.”

“Well, that’s a relief. And what information are you looking for, exactly?”

“Just local gossip.”

She was so transparent I could see the sardine tins behind her.

“Mair?”

“Basic information, that kind of thing. Who lives where? What do they do for a living? If they have a boat or a truck. Where you can get hold of basic goods and materials like bricks or manure or cement…”

“Mair?”

“…or rat poison.”