The Bangkok Asset

30

It does not take a great feat of detection. I used to know the names of all the bars in Pat Pong because Mama Nong still worked there from time to time while I was growing up. When I tick them off in my mind, one name in particular hits me like a truck. I take a cab to Pat Pong.

It’s a discreet little pub, less than half the size of the great sex palaces that line the street. It looks as if it caters to a regular clientele and has no need to advertise: the sort of bar that remains a favorite with oldies, Vietnam vets in particular. And of course, bars like this where everyone pays cash are second only to casinos as facilities for laundering money.

Exactly as I remembered, the legend in italics above the entrance reads simply Silver’s. It is late afternoon and the cleaning staff are at work making it all shipshape for the evening’s festivities: aroma of pine cleaning fluid; women with bamboo brooms sweeping; a supervisor in her late forties checking the register. There is a platform for girls to dance in bikinis, or in their birthday suits; it’s small, though, with hardly room for more than three girls. All in all the bar is a little money box that would not cost much in terms of bribes to keep it operating.

None of the cleaning staff want to bother with me, which allows me to walk up to the woman at the cash register and ask, in the most casual of voices, “Is Khun da Silva around?”

She does not look up. “No.”

“Can you tell me how I can contact him?”

Now she looks up. “No.”

“Why not?”

She pauses in her work to assess me. “Look, if you’re law enforcement, we already paid this month. You need to check with Colonel Wanakan.”

When she tries to go back to unpacking paper tubes of ten-baht coins, I place an arm across the till. She stares at me, more in contempt than fear. “You don’t have to tell me where he is. You only have to call him, then pass me the phone.” At the same time I am flashing my cop ID.

She shrugs. “Who shall I say wants to speak to him?”

“Tell him Son of Jack.”

“Son of Jack?”

“Yes. Son of Jack and Nong.”

I watch while she picks up her own phone and presses an autodial number. She repeats my message into the phone, then hands it to me. Silence, then: “Yes?”

“I need to see you.”

“Impossible. Why?”

I try to think how to play it. What do I have that a man like that could possibly relate to? “Desolation,” I say.

–

The address is less than ten minutes’ walk from Silver’s, a midrange apartment building with underground parking and a three-man security detail in the lobby. When I explain I’m here to see Khun Da-Sil-Va (you need to pronounce it in a singsong if you want to be understood, with the Da high, the Sil low, and the Va high), the mood music changes. The security makes a call to someone who must be fluent in Thai, then gives me a high wai when they close the phone. With a deference usually reserved in our culture for money and aristocracy, they show me to a private lift that serves the penthouse.

Penthouses are special worldwide. In Southeast Asia they tend to be almost unbuyable, because the developer reserves them for himself, either to live in or let, or as a safe repository of wealth. I’m holding that thought when the door opens and a Thai man in his early forties opens the door. He doesn’t need to pump iron, this guard, nature and a childhood in Isaan built him like a tank. Once I’m over the threshold, an American voice calls in Thai.

“He’s here,” the bodyguard says, and shows me into a reception area with upscale furnishings. I’m guessing the apartment is at least ten thousand square feet. The man in the wheelchair is looking out the window at the cityscape of Pat Pong and Sarawong. From another angle it is just possible to glimpse the river. Even from the back I can see how huge his head is, how developed those arms and shoulders. He tells the guard to leave us, and only after the door has shut does he swing his chair around. He is old, of course, well over sixty. I don’t know if he kept his hair color or if he dies it black; everything about him gives the impression of latent power-except he has no legs. He offers a hand; I shake it.

“So, you found me.”

“Did you expect me to?”

He shrugs those enormous shoulders. “It was always a possibility.” He frowns. “But I don’t know where he is, don’t want to know, haven’t wanted to know for four decades.” He makes a grimace. “We had a falling-out.”

“How’s that?”

He nods in the direction of where his legs once were. “He couldn’t handle it. You could almost say it was worse for him than me. He filled his heart with rage and a lust for vengeance. Joined Special Forces. They mangled his personality, he went through a total change, hundred and eighty degrees. I had enough to cope with, my own head wasn’t so strong after the grenade, but my mother was a good Catholic who brought me up to avoid feelings of intense hatred. The way I saw it, we invaded someone else’s country and got what was coming to us. I felt unlucky, but not unjustly treated-at least not by Charlie. I told him I couldn’t handle seeing him anymore. Then he volunteered for something else-something even worse.” He pauses to stare into space. He whispers hoarsely, “The first five years after the attack are a blur to me. It was all sex and drugs on the way to oblivion.”

“What happened to change you?”

He smiles. “My mother came to see me. She figured I wouldn’t be able to stand her heartache. She was right. She was also no longer young. I promised to go on living for as long as she did-but I wasn’t going back to the States.” He raises his great arms then lets them down. “No way she really understood what that meant in the seventies, coming from a vet who had settled in Bangkok.”

“What did it mean?”

He scowls. “That woman managing the bar told me you’re a cop. Do you have to ask?”

I let the question hang for a moment. “You had no start-up money to open a bar?”

“Now you’re getting close.”

“You’re not known to law enforcement in Thailand-I checked.”

He nods. “So, I don’t need to spell it out for you, do I?”

“Some non-Thai agency heard about you. CIA or FBI? One or the other. They came to see you.” I wave a hand at the enormous room. “Owning a modest bar doesn’t buy this kind of accommodation. But they must have had more than suspicions.”

“They had a scandal is what they had. Sending young American men to get themselves killed and mutilated in a lost cause was bad enough. To compound that with stuffing the bodies of heroes with smack before flying the bags home-that had to be dealt with, and seen to be dealt with. But I was lucky, they had nothing at all on me. On the other hand, it would have been easy-very, very easy-to fit me up.” He scratches an ear. “I don’t know how the name of your father came up. They kind of inserted it into the conversation, it seemed for no reason. Then I realized they wanted something from me.”

“What?”

“Silence. It was the late seventies, the great scandal of Frank Olson was still in everyone’s mind. The war was long lost. They knew I knew your father had volunteered for that program. Far more important to the agency than violations of the bodies of heroes was the containing of MKUltra.”

“Go on.”

“Naturally, I promised on my honor not to participate in or in any way become involved with that particularly despicable form of private enterprise that so desecrated the bodies of the fallen. And I promised never to talk about your father and MKUltra.”

“In return, it seems they left you alone?”

“Yes. I would have preferred they hadn’t gone and lost me my legs in the first place.” He makes a gesture to include the whole penthouse. “This is just a consolation prize. There were quite a few vets who took the same route. At one time half the bars on Pat Pong were part-owned by vets. Some of them are still around.”

“You said they ‘inserted’ the name of my father into the conversation.”

“Yeah.”

“What was that name?”

“Jack.”

“Jack what?”

He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right? Or are you deaf?”

“He’s my father, I have a right to know.”

“And I have a right to go on living in crippled luxury. If and when you report this conversation, there’s only one conclusion that matters: I refused to tell you the name of your father. End of story.” He stares at me. “Maybe you are desperate, but how am I supposed to test that? You could be working for them, trying to set me up.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

He shrugs. “If I knew why the CIA do things I would have detailed knowledge of why the world is so fucked, wouldn’t I?”

“But why would my father’s name be an issue? When you knew him you were both FNGs, hanging out together, doing R amp;R in Bangkok. You must have known his family name? You must have heard it every day at roll call.”

He swings his chair around to stare at the distant river. Now he has his back to me and seems to be talking as much to himself as to me.

“He called you Sonchai. Is that still your name?”

“Yes.”

He gives a dry chuckle. “It took me five years of learning Thai before I realized he’d screwed up. The standard name is Somchai-with an m. Sonchai means to think or dream. It kind of symbolized everything, that little mistake of his. Like no matter how hard we tried, we were bound to screw up out of sheer ignorance.” He swings the chair around again to face me. “I cannot tell you his family name because they disappeared him, airbrushed him out-with his consent.”

He is not without compassion. He has to take a deep breath before he is able to say, “He doesn’t exist, Sonchai, except as a ghost, a memory. That was the deal he made when he volunteered, and they expect it to stay that way.”

I stand still, frozen. He turns away from my gaze. “Think it through, Detective. You leave this building knowing the family name of someone who was volunteered for Ultra. Now you or someone working for you starts to make inquiries over the Net, using that name. Within hours I receive a visit. Maybe this time they’ll come with local law enforcement and a file full of evidence, real or false, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Linking you with the smuggling of heroin in the body bags?”

He stares at me until I break eye contact. “You’re smart, but maybe a little naïve, and that leads you to miss the point.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re living in a giant Ponzi scheme. The Fed buys Treasury bonds without spending money because it doesn’t have any. Currency is created on a computer-it’s totally notional. There is nothing at all to back it up. The system was never designed that way, we’re in a virtual universe.”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

“The black hole is massive and it’s eating the world. Even ordinary Americans have started to feel it. Government has come to mean papering over the abyss with fairy tales. Politicians know those fairy tales are the only things people are still willing to vote for. But it’s very fragile. Anything can pop the balloon at any moment. There’s no morality in government service, except the duty to keep covering up. No one wants to be the whistle-blower who destroyed the world. Even sleeping scandals from long ago have the power to bring down the seawall. So what do you think the intelligence services of the planet are really planning for? Not sabotage by a foreign power, but massive civil unrest. A super police force manned by supermen and superwomen is the only way to go.” He stares at me as if sorely tempted to say more. Then he shuts up and turns away. I think, Black hole, that phrase again.

I give it one last shot. “He must have come to see you after he was in the Ultra program. At least once, or you wouldn’t know all this.”

He looks me in the eye. “He wasn’t the same man, Sonchai, he really wasn’t the same man.”