The Bangkok Asset

11

The best place to buy carved wooden religious objects was on Petchburi Road. In a shop surrounded by Buddhas, bodhisattvas, monks, angels, fairies, gnomes, and demons, I scratched my head. Personally, I was partial to the old Burmese carved monks, for the workmanship (you buy them in pairs: skinny with walking sticks, bent, devout, cheerful, at peace). In the old days the carver meditated until he saw the subject in the crude wood before he started chiseling. I found a couple of teak monks that would fit beside me on the seat of a cab and haggled over the price until I lost patience and paid up. I carried the monks to the cab, where I carefully set them down in the backseat, according them all dignity.

When I arrived at the police post in Klong Toey, I saw that a supper of rice whiskey and noodles had liberated the sweetness within the middle-aged cop. What a lifetime of self-denial and contemplation had done for the monks, a quarter bottle of Mekong had done for him. With alcohol, though, it’s all about timing. If I’d arrived earlier, he might have retained some resistance; later and he would probably be incoherent or belligerent. I’d bought a flask of my own to top him up if necessary.

I carried the monks out of the cab and set them down on his desk as he watched. At this moment it did not matter, according to the theology, how I treated the sculptures, because they had not yet been consecrated, but I showed respect anyway. The Sergeant stood back to assess them.

“Burmese? Nineteenth century? Will you look at those heads…The model the sculptor used-must have been a child or a young woman-perfect. What a wonderful image of innocence! Reminds me of the kids here, before they go wrong.”

He saw no contradiction between innocence and the hundred scams he was up to his ears in; his contemplation had long ago taken him beyond such false distinctions. Nor did it matter that I was bribing him with religious objects: it made him feel all the more devout.

He had placed his great chair with cushions outside his cabin and invited me to grab one of the tubular chairs inside. He placed the flask of Mekong I’d brought on a small collapsible table between the chairs. We drank out of plastic cups and talked about Klong Toey, the slum and the famous market of the same name.

He particularly wanted to talk about the market, how it was the closest to the port and received goods brought from overseas via the Gulf of Thailand, but also, because the port was on the river, goods are brought there from the interior. True, he explained, “It’s not a wholesale market, but most restaurants, especially the thousands of cooked-food stalls, buy a lot of food in detail rather than bulk.” I knew that to be true. Come between three and six in the morning and you’ll see a representative of just about every major restaurant in the city, even the very top end, which send the chefs themselves to find the choice sea bass, snow fish, fresh chicken, rabbit, beef, every variety of chili, lemongrass (gross or in detail), and every other herb, vegetable, meat, fish, or poultry that hit the tables of restaurants and private homes throughout the city every day. Italian chefs in particular valued our basil, which we cultivate in a number of varieties: sweet, holy, and hairy.

But I didn’t understand why we were talking about basil when he knew very well why I’d come. I was wondering if he was not just too drunk, too old, or too decadent to be of use, when he said, “It was an accident, you know.”

“What? The bombing? How can a bombing be an accident?”

“Not the bombing, the casualties. It was the first Thursday in the month.”

“So?”

“First Thursday in the month, those Yanks were normally up before dawn-usually about three-thirty a.m.-to visit the market.”

“They were in the catering business?” He grunted and wasn’t going to speak until I’d at least started to work it out. “There’s a delivery-a special delivery-first Thursday in the month?”

“Sure. A rice barge brings it from the north. The kingpins are Lao. Everyone in the business knows. I bet your Colonel Vikorn knows. It’s basically cottage-industry stuff, though.”

I was trying to decrypt the story, which was not difficult, and at the same time trying to fit it in with what little I knew about the three Americans. It seemed they had only been hanging out in Bangkok for ten months. I had no information about where they were before that, but ten months is not long enough to set up a fully protected trafficking operation from scratch all on your own, not if you want to be secure. You would need local input, local operators you trusted. I figure there is only one plausible explanation.

“They came to you when they first arrived? They were old Southeast Asia hands who were naturalized Cambodians, so they would know the form if not the local language.”

“They came to me for help. They said they’d had to leave Cambodia, but they didn’t say why they were in Cambodia, or why three Americans their age could not return to the States. But they were sincere, I could see that. I felt compassion for them. Obviously, they needed a trade, some way to make dough. And they learned Thai much quicker than most farang, because they were already fluent in Khmer. After a couple of months they were part of the furniture. Very unusual.”

I’d been trying to keep my sipping of the Mekong to a minimum, but I was starting to feel a tad tipsy. “You set it up for them?”

“I never set up anything. I told them a certain wholesaler who brings sacks of jasmine rice down from the north occasionally brings something else in the bags. He is very discreet, a careful man, almost as old as them. I like dealing with old men, they’re safer and they don’t have ridiculous ambitions. It turned out fine. The rice producer would hold a monthly auction among, say, ten trusted dealers, usually dividing the produce up between them. They each have their own patch, so there’s no fighting. The Americans would buy just enough to sell to American tourists they felt they could trust. They would hang out in Khaosan Road, checking out just the right farang who wants to get high in Asia, but is old enough and cool enough to keep quiet. That’s what I knew they would do and it worked out fine.”

“But how did the wholesaler know to trust them? And I bet they have safe passage with the dope anywhere in Klong Toey. And I bet that cost them at least ten percent. And I bet you charged a setup fee as well.”

“Win-win,” the Sergeant said, lighting a Krong Thip 90 and sipping some more whiskey. “One of them told me there are farang books about it. Economics, they call it.”

“So what happened this month? Why weren’t they at the market on the last Thursday?”

“ ’Cause they didn’t need to be. These are not ambitious empire builders. They did so well in their sales the previous month, they had enough money to last them. There was a group of oldies passing through, relatives of vets missing in action, just come back from Vietnam. Bought up all their stock. They always worked on a sufficiency basis. They were careful never to take too much.”

I sipped the Mekong and nodded. It was important not to rush him. “You mean, whoever planted the bomb was relying on them being out, at the market, when it went off?”

“Why else choose that morning on that day of the month? There are no coincidences in Thailand.”

I scratched my chin. “So the bomb was just to scare them?”

“Yes, that’s my theory.”

“But why?”

He shrugged. “In Bangkok it could be anything. Maybe the bombers thought the Americans had cheated them. Maybe they were just Thais who don’t like farang moving into the business. Or it could be something else. Like I say, those old men have only been here less than a year. They would have a lot of history from another country, wouldn’t they? And what kind of history, when you consider they chose to live in the lowest kind of third-world slum?”

I let a couple of beats pass. Atmosphere is important for intuition, and that’s the faculty I wanted the Sergeant to exercise right now. “You’re right, dead right. Why did they need Klong Toey? Those old men, the three of them-there must have been something different about them that you noticed. There aren’t any other farang living here, not even birdshit farang like them. And, frankly, I’ve never heard of Americans becoming Cambodian citizens. The traffic tends to be in the other direction.”

He took a deep toke on his Krong Thip, sipped some more Mekong, and nodded. “That’s right.”

“So, what about them?”

“At first they seemed just like old farang men, you know, kind of charming, steady, very likable, been in the East a long time, smart enough to be polite like Thais instead of aggressive like farang.”

“Then?”

“Then, when you watched them carefully, you realized they were all crazy. In a very specific way that’s hard to explain and not actually out of control in the way of most crazies. But they were all nuts.”

“Could you be a little more specific? You call someone crazy, you have to have a reason.”

“Ask anyone who knew them around here.”

I lost patience. “But what were the symptoms?”

“You don’t have to snap. I know what you want to know, but there’s no way to tell you what you want to know, because it’s so hard to explain. If one of them recovers, spend an hour with him and you’ll see what I mean.”

I grunted, leaned back in the chair, tried to tune in to his long, slow waves. “In what way crazy? Give me an example.”

“In the middle of a conversation they would break off.”

“Old men’s minds wander.”

“This wasn’t wandering. They would break off and think very intensely about something for as long as five minutes, as though they were in a different world, then return to the conversation. They all did it. They were aware of it and tried to cover up. That’s what was crazy.”

At the moment I had no way of absorbing Lotus Bud’s psychoanalysis of the three old men. I was as drunk as I needed to be to bond with the Sergeant, who was quite drunk himself. I figured it was now or never with my killer question.

“Sergeant,” I said softly, in a tone I’d not used before. Even in his inebriation he noticed the nuance, laid his head back, closed his eyes, then opened the left one to glance at me. “The smart phone you found after the explosion.” He grunted, closed both eyes. “Sergeant, it was in exceptionally good condition for a phone that had been thrown up in the air by a bomb and landed on concrete. It was not only brand-new, it was an Apple 5s-a luxury, almost like jewelry, costs over twenty-five thousand baht new, when anyone can buy a cell phone for just a few thousand. I bet there’s no one in Klong Toey who owns an iPhone-not a legal one, anyway. Everyone around here buys fakes or secondhand or stolen. And that place where you said you found it, that was quite a way from the bomb site. A delicate thing like a phone, especially a sophisticated one like that…Well, it was operating perfectly, wasn’t it? Those photos of me were clear and bright, just as if the phone had not been through an explosion. And it was brand-new.”

A long pause during which LB took a slug of rice whiskey. “He said I had to let you figure it out for yourself. He didn’t really care if you found out, but I wasn’t to tell you unless you figured it out first. He’s playing some game with you.”

“You mean someone came to see you? Before or after the explosion?”

“After. A few hours after.”

“And gave you that iPhone and told you to call Vikorn?”

“Yes.”

“Who was he?”

“An American.”

“Huge, old, a giant?”

“No. He wasn’t old. He was tall. Slim. Young. Very fit like an athlete or a military man. His hair was very short and so blond it was almost white. A killer.”

“How would you know that?”

“How would I not know that? I’ve been a cop in Klong Toey for three decades. How could I survive if I didn’t know men? And women too. Pimps, whores, pickpockets, burglars, car thieves, murderers for passion, murderers for greed: each one has a different signal, a different smell.”

“How was his signal?”

“Flat. Only killers for fun have that signal. What do you call them?”

“Psychopaths.”

“Right.”

A pause while I absorbed this wisdom. “That’s all-he came, gave you the phone, and told you to call me but not to mention him?”

“Yes. He said you would be very interested. It was very private, very personal. Between you and him. He said you and he would be meeting soon. He said you and he are going to be very close.” Lotus Bud turned his head. “I thought about that. You’re working on that murder of a young woman who lived in the market square behind the police station in District 8, right?”

“Yes.”

“Have you thought about where that is exactly? I checked on a map after he left.”

“Of course I know where it is.”

“I mean geographically.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s the exact geographic center of District 8. If D8 is a chessboard, that murder happened on the center squares. Your district, with your name on the mirror. What could be clearer than that?”

We stared at each other. Now my cell phone started to ring. I fished it out impatiently, afraid that the Sergeant would change his mind about confiding his thoughts to me. It was the young Detective Tassatorn again.

“Khun Sonchai? I have news. Do you want the good or the bad first?”

He was a little breathless, and at first I supposed it must be because he’d cracked the case and, like a good Buddhist, was trying not to sound too proud of himself.

“The good first.”

“I’ve found them.”

“Who?”

“The two young thugs who set that bomb.”

I let a couple of beats pass. “Really?”

“They were seen. Two separate witnesses saw them running from the explosion and recognized them. They’re low-grade crooks, lowlifes who do small crime to get by, not real pros.”

“They have form?”

“Tons of it. One has a sideline in bomb-making. Not big terrorist stuff, you know, just local intimidation work. He specializes in settling scores. I don’t need to tell you how the mafia likes to use explosives. They scare more and can be hard to trace. He was also involved in that car-parts scam, you know, Red Kim’s gang were bringing in spare parts and assembling high-end foreign cars from them to dodge the tax.”

“So what, you found prints?”

“Not prints. The bomb experts were able to find traces of liquid petroleum gas. I organized a raid and there were traces on their clothes.”

I glanced at the Sergeant, who was developing deep religious feelings for the two carved monks I’d brought him and listening to the conversation at the same time.

“That’s pretty good news. Wow! You really work fast. You did all that in less than forty-eight hours.” I heard the purring of an ambitious young man on the other phone. “So where is the bad news in all that?”

“They retained Lord Sakagorn.”

“Sakagorn?”

The Sergeant perked up for a moment, then returned to his reverie.

“Yes.”

I let a couple of beats pass. “I see. So did you get a confession, any kind of statement?”

“No. Sakagorn found holes in the way I obtained the warrant. It’s true, I cut a few corners-how was I to know they’d instruct him? He thinks up legal points even the judges have never heard of. He sent one of his assistants to the station to argue, orally and in writing, that there is no power in any of the police statutes and decrees that enables us to hold those suspects. All our evidence was obtained illegally, according to Sakagorn. What do I know? Everybody skipped those courses at the academy. The instructors didn’t know the law either.”

I scratched my jaw, remembering my own year as a cadet. Law was not big on the syllabus. “I see.”

“Detective,” the young detective said in a low tone, “should I be scared?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Please advise me.”

“Let’s look at it both ways. Say you decide to take on Lord Sakagorn and prosecute. You will be bombarded with offers of wealth and rapid advancement if you play ball, and threats of dire consequences if you don’t. In the unlikely event that you win against him in court and get a conviction, he won’t rest until he has used his influence to destroy your career. He’ll find a way to discredit you and win on appeal. If, on the other hand, you play ball with Sakagorn, then kiss your freedom and integrity goodbye, he will own you for life.”

On the other end of the phone I heard the sharp gasp of a young man who had just entered the last initiation, the one where you finally admit there is no way out. My mood altered when he started to cry.

“I knew it would be like this. They warned me, but I believed in my karma and the teachings of the Buddha. They said that I was like a white sheet that would be dipped in black dye every day. From white I would go to dirty white, to gray-in the end, I would be pure black. But I didn’t want to believe them. How have you managed, Khun Sonchai, all these years? You are famous for not taking money.”

“Even preserving one’s soul requires a certain amount of wriggling, Khun Tassatorn. Innocence can’t save you all on its own, it needs help from experience.”

“Yes. I can see that. Do you want the bombing case? Are you saying this to enhance your career?”

“I don’t want it at all. My career cannot be enhanced. I have a reputation, like you say, for not taking money, career advancement is blocked for me. You still have a chance, you’re young and ambitious, it’s just bad luck you got landed with this. You are more than welcome to keep the case, if you like.”

“I’m not crying for my career, Khun Sonchai, I’m crying for Thailand.”

“I know, Khun Tassatorn. What would you like me to do?”

“Take the case, Khun Sonchai. My chief will find a way of transferring it to District 8 if Colonel Vikorn wants it. Colonel Vikorn gets what Colonel Vikorn wants, everyone knows that. Now we’ve talked I know you are so much stronger than I. Perhaps only you could take on a case like this and survive. But please answer one question: why are you so interested in this particular matter? To tell you the truth, I never would have worked so hard if you had not inspired me with your overwhelming passion, rushing off to the hospital like that to visit those old men. I’ve never seen anything like it. When I asked people if Khun Sonchai Jitpleecheep was like this on all his cases, they told me no, normally you were not the kind of cop who always gets his man. Normally you were very reasonable and laid-back, they told me.”

I was not sure how to answer. Why did I rush off to see those three unconscious men? It was the photos on the cell phone of course. Someone takes a hundred pictures of you, the hungry heart assumes it must be love. Curious how the spirit moves.

“I’m not especially interested in the case, Detective. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other, plodding along. I’ve always found that to be the safest.”

“Is that what you advise?”

The trouble with innocence: it tries to recruit someone who has lost it to help retain it. “I don’t advise anything at all, Khun Tassatorn. War is always a balance between wanting to win and needing to survive.”

A long pause. “War. Yes, that’s the one thing they don’t tell you in the academy. From the first day on the beat, you’re at war. And you start thinking like someone in the middle of a battle that never ends.” His voice turned bitter. “You start to think like a cornered rat.”

I let the moment pass.

“It’s not only police work that’s like that,” I said. “My wife is an unemployed academic and she feels pretty much the same way.”

He grunted. I gave him time to recover. Now he changed tack.

“Yes, please take the case. You are braver and tougher than I’ll ever be.”

“There’s no need to talk like that, Khun Tassatorn. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning. I was in the same position as you once.”

“No,” he said with some finality. “In the morning I will not feel better. In the morning I will resign and ordain as a monk. It was the vocation I should have chosen in the first place. I was not made for this world. I’m not built of steel like you. What do you say to that?”

“If you really do it, I shall envy you.”

“Then I will do it,” he said, and closed the phone. I put my own back in my pocket.

“You didn’t talk about those photos of you on the cell phones,” Sergeant Lotus Bud said out of the corner of his mouth.

Throughout my conversation with Tassatorn, the Sergeant’s head had sagged farther and farther to one side until it was resting on his shoulder and he had appeared to be asleep. I shook my head. My street smarts simply did not compare with his.

“He didn’t mention it.”

“Scared,” LB said. “Those pix I found are the real reason he’s giving you the case.”

“Those pictures of me on that iPhone? So how do you explain them?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Lotus Bud said. “But that young blond guy knew all about those old guys, who had been dealing dope for a year. In that time you learn a lot about the business.” He raised a droopy eyebrow to look at me. “You learn what a lot of us have heard over the grapevine.”

“Like what?”

“Like stories about a certain respected detective with a weakness for weed who helps to run his mother’s bar on Soi Cowboy. You would have been the answer to their prayers if they could have first taken you on as a client, then maybe persuaded you to help with sales contacts. That way they would have had cast-iron protection-that’s the way they would have seen it. It’s the way Asia works, and they knew that. Don’t tell me that didn’t cross your mind?”

I sighed and took out a five-hundred-baht note to slip under the can of Nescafé on the shrine to the household gods.

“Of course it crossed my mind,” I lied.

The Sergeant used his cell phone to call a cab. I heard him tell the driver to put the ride on the Sergeant’s own bill. He was quite emotional when we said goodbye, I assumed because we’d bonded while drunk. Or perhaps he thought I didn’t have much time left in this body. Just before the cab drew away he said, “Of course, that wouldn’t explain a hundred photos. It would explain the connection but not the photos.”

“That’s right.”

He grunted. “And it wouldn’t explain why the phone came to me via that young farang killer.” He scratched his beard. “Not every mystery has a solution-which is okay, solutions can be dangerous.”

“Yes.”

“There’s one other thing, though. I’m surprised you didn’t ask about it.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I don’t speak English worth a damn and that young American only had basic Thai.”

Now I knew I was losing my skill set. Why didn’t I think of that? “So how did you communicate?”

“Khmer. Same as I used with the old Americans, before they mastered Thai. I was brought up in Surin. Khmer was the local dialect.”

“He was fluent?”

“Spoke it like a native. Better than me. The Surin dialect is pretty basic, but he spoke the real thing without accent.”

–

In the back of the cab on the way home, with no fellow human to distract me, the mind returns to primal chaos. I am like a tower of billiard balls that miraculously remained vertical for a moment and now collapses as I knew I would. Why me? is the question everyone asks at this point in a breakdown. I go over the three curses for the thousandth time: Nong X, murdered, my name on the mirror; an iPhone with one name in the Contacts application and a hundred photos of me; another cell phone with three more photos of me. None of this should have destroyed my sense of self were there not the haunting possibility that one of those Americans in the hospital, all of whom are naturalized Cambodians, may be my father and the looming conviction that we are all implicated in something bigger than a murder and a son in search of a dad.

When I arrive at the hovel Chanya is awake and working at her desk. I enter and press my back against the door before succumbing to the tremble-and-blurt phase of mental disintegration. At first she wants to carry on working; then she decides that as my lifelong companion she may have a part to play in my despair; then, as I blurt with ever greater rapidity, trying to pierce her shell, she gets up, takes my hand, and has me sit in her chair while she squats in front of me.

“But these are two totally unrelated issues, work and personal issues, all mixed up,” she explains in a tone that scrupulously avoids sentimentality. “You need to distinguish them.”

“How?”

“Well, work is real, and all this lost-father stuff is just something that’s been hanging there rotting in the back of your mind forever.”

I stare wild-eyed at her, failing to comprehend her total lack of comprehension. Then she remembers she once did a course on what might be termed first-response therapy: Cries for Help and How to React to Them. She suddenly assumes a care-and-concern expression (wide and worried eyes, furrowed brow, social-worker buzzwords, physical contact to provide the illusion of warmth, nauseating patience). When she starts to wipe my brow, hold my hand, and gaze earnestly into my eyes, it pisses me off so much I pull out of it and push her away. Am I alone in preferring madness to therapy? She now stands up in a flash of anger.

“So, have you spoken to your mother about any of this?” she snaps.

“Any of what? Decapitation? Transhumanism? Geopolitics?”

“That’s all professional stuff, that isn’t what’s bothering you. It’s the illusory connection between you and those three Americans: you have transferred your personal id onto what should be superego preoccupied with work and contribution to society-I’m using old vocabulary here, but the ideas are basically the same today as in the time of Freud.”

“Huh?”

“Of course none of those old farang are your father. That’s a classic transference from fantasy to reality. The reason there were photos of you on that old cell phone was just as Lotus Bud said: they heard you were a smoker and a cop and wanted you as a client.”

“So what about the hundred pictures on the iPhone? What about my name on the mirror in blood?”

She waves a hand. “Stuff like that can always be explained, once the whole picture is clear.” I see from her face that it is quite a while since she did the course. She is not totally sure she is following the right tack. “Clearly, the father thing is at the root of all this. I’m going to speak to your mother tomorrow. Perhaps some kind of intervention is what you need.”

That seems to have exhausted the twenty-first century’s reservoir of compassion. I’m happier when she reverts to a more primitive technique. She gives me a big smacker on the lips, jiggles my dick in a friendly way, grins right into my face, and says, “What about that oil Krom gave you? How are you supposed to smoke it?”

I sag with relief: whatever the issues between us, we are both big fans of self-medication. Now Chanya is intrigued by the idea of dipping a couple of cigarettes in the oil, then baking the cigarettes at hundred degrees centigrade for fifteen minutes until the solvent has burned off, leaving, in theory, pure THC stuck to the tobacco fibers. Neither of us have smoked this way before and we have no idea what to expect. We bake two Marlboros, one each, lie on the mattress with a makeshift ashtray on either side, smile at each other, and light up.

So far as I can recall I was a third of the way through my own little ciggy when I found important information to share with Chanya. This stuff is really strong, is what I wanted to say, but the words came out so garbled that even I could not understand them. It didn’t matter, for Chanya was lying dead straight, arms rigidly by her side, her eyes firmly fixed on the Invisible. Eventually she roused herself enough to say, “Krom’s oil is very strong,” and returned to heaven. For myself, while I felt in full control of my mind, my facial and tongue muscles were a different matter. The couple of syllables I attempted seemed garbled; I could not understand what I was trying to say. And so we lay on our backs, the two of us, for quite a few hours, our bodies touching, our souls a cosmos apart. From time to time during the course of the night I returned to earth to take a glance at Chanya, who remained rigid, bug-eyed, and enthralled by my side.