Bangkok Tattoo (24 page)

When I look up at the Buddha statue, I finally understand why I’m feeling so edgy. The little guy is fresh out of marigolds. Out in the street I find a flower vendor, from whom I buy as many garlands as I can carry. (Wherever you go in my country there will be a flower vendor, her stall laden with Buddha garlands: it’s a sure bet in a land populated by sixty-one million gamblers.) As soon as I’ve smothered him in flowers, I light a bunch of incense, which my mother keeps under the counter,
wai
him mindfully three times, and stick the incense in the little sand pit we keep for that purpose and beg him to switch the luck back on. The minute I’ve finished, my mother Nong arrives with her arms full of marigolds.

“I was so busy yesterday I forgot to feed him,” she explains from behind all the flowers. I don’t say anything, merely watch while she takes in the garlands I’ve just hung all over him. “Oh. Well, he’ll forgive us now.” A beam. “We should be in for some really good luck. How did you get on in Songai Kolok?”

I make a face and tell her to sit down at one of the tables. I tell her about the diary and the all-important fact that Chanya knew Mitch Turner in the United States. Had a passionate affair with him. Nong gets the point immediately. “There could be evidence linking her to him? If the Americans investigate, they’ll surely find out he was seeing a Thai girl in Washington. Even though she was traveling on someone else’s passport, they might find out who she really is?”

“Exactly.”

I gaze up at the Buddha and make a face. How many marigolds will it take before he forgives us for neglecting him? Nong follows the direction of my gaze, goes up to him, lights a bunch of incense, and
wais
mindfully, with rather more piety than I was able to muster.

“I’m sure you didn’t
wai
him properly,” she scolds. “It’ll be okay now.”

Now “Satisfaction” is playing on my mobile. It’s Vikorn, wanting to know how I got on in Songai Kolok. “You better get over here,” he tells me, and closes the phone.

The public area of the station is crowded with the usual collection: beggars, whores, monks, wives complaining about their violent husbands, husbands complaining about their thieving, lying wives, lost children, the bewildered, the ruthless, the poor. Everyone here is poor. Vikorn’s corridor is empty, though, as is his room apart from him. He listens while I tell him more about Chanya’s diary and the CIA men Hudson and Bright who turned up in Songai Kolok. He stands after a while, then walks up and down with his hands in his pockets.

“Look at it this way. You’re a brilliant scholar with at least a Ph.D. in something hideously complicated. While still an idealistic student, you decide to serve your country by joining the CIA, which eagerly recruits you. Ten years down the track you are no longer a naÏve student. Everyone you knew at college is earning twice your salary and having fun spending money. Men and women who were twenty percent dumber than you in school are now captains of industry, technology billionaires—maybe they’ve retired already from their first careers.
They
don’t have to worry about what they do and don’t say to their wives and families,
they
don’t need to think that the order could come from on high any minute for them to pack their bags and spend four or five years of their lives in some godforsaken dump like Songai Kolok.
They
don’t suffer polygraph tests every six months, random drug tests, electronic eavesdropping. You, on the other hand, are snared in the organization. Promotion is the only hope, the only way out of an incredibly frustrating trap. Now, spying is just the same as soldiering in one respect. What you need is a nice big war to open up the promotion prospects. Since 9/11, there is only one way anyone in the Agency is going to get promotion, and that is by nabbing a few Al Qaeda operatives. Tell me, how did they strike you, those guys you met who were sniffing around Mitch Turner’s apartment?”

As usual, my master has effortlessly demonstrated his strategic genius, the superiority of his mind, his encyclopedic grasp of human weakness in all its guises. “The older one, Hudson, was exactly like that,” I admit.

“Middle-aged, frustrated, desperate for promotion, sick to death of the tedium of small-scale spying, wondering what the hell he’s doing in the third world when he expected to be driving a nice big desk in Washington at this stage in his career, ideologically jaded?”

“Yes.” It does not seem appropriate to mention Hudson’s extraterrestrial origins at this moment.

“And the other one?”

“Typical socially immature
farang
male with big ideas and tendency to walk into elephant traps.” There seems no need to go into the poor boy’s antecedents; people simply do not realize how boring most past lives are. Like so many of our species, Bright has been a herd animal for more than a thousand years, getting himself honorably killed in most of history’s great battles. Doubt did not enter his soul until he lay limbless and dying at Da Nang, when he entertained the unthinkable:
Had he been misled?

“Hmm.” Looking at me brightly: “The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?” He stares at me. I shrug. “It’s simply a matter of being careful.” He makes that obscene fish-tickling gesture and grins.

When I check on Lek, I find he has called in sick for two days. Nobody knows where he is. When I call Fatima, she doesn’t know, either.

“Should we be worried?” I ask her.

“Darling, it was his moment. I had to kick him out of his comfortable little nest. Did he fly or not? There are no rules. If he survives, he’ll be back. He can’t do without me now.”

“You didn’t even check on him?”

“Don’t be a child, darling.”

Chanya in my dreams again last night. An artificial lake of the kind only seen in Rajasthan, a perfect square with a temple apparently floating on a white raft in the center. On shore, a line of forlorn young men. Each pilgrim is ferried out to the island for an interview with a Buddhist monk who resides there. When it is my turn, I find I cannot look into the monk’s eyes. My hand holds out a photograph of Chanya. I wake up in a sweat.

The dream has shaken me. I don’t think I’d admitted to myself how desperately I wanted her, and now I’m going through that disgusting form of anguish that is so entertaining when it happens to someone else. Having Vikorn make snide references to my emotional life is one thing, but to be outed by the transcendent is quite a different kettle of
pla.
Even so, I take a good couple of hours before I open my mobile and flick through the names until I reach C.

“Sonchai?” she says in that designed-to-melt tone that makes you want to kill her when she uses it on other men.

“I was just wondering how you were getting on.”

“Were you? Did you read my diary?”

A hoarse whisper: “Yes.”

“I suppose it’s not that interesting, really. I just thought you would want to know the background, in case . . .”

“Sure. I understand. There are a couple of things, though, maybe we should talk about.”

“There are? Like what?”

“Hard to talk over the phone, don’t you think?”

“In case we’re being listened to? Is it that bad already?”

“Ah, maybe, we just don’t know.”

“What d’you want to do?”

“Maybe we should have a bite to eat?”

28

F
orget it,
farang,
I’m not telling you what happened at supper. Let’s say I made a total needy, clumsy, nerve-racked asshole of myself (there’s a reason why love is female in all responsible cosmologies, it turns men into clowns), but the steamed bass with lime was excellent, the cold Australian white out of this world, and my uncompromising kiss smack on the divine lips when we said goodbye better than both. (If she didn’t know before that I was gaga, she does now.) I’ll leave it at that for the moment, if you don’t mind. I’m taking it as a manifestation of cosmic compassion that she’s not working anymore. No, of course I didn’t tell her about the dream.

It is about ten in the evening when I return to the Old Man’s Club, where my mother has been in charge. She is nowhere to be seen, but many of the customers are wrinkling their noses in judgmental style.

I trace the aroma to the covered area in the yard where Nong is sitting. She does something furtive with her hands when she sees me, but it is too late.

“I thought you were on a diet.”

“I am. It includes fruit.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t just say fruit. I bet it says citrus fruit or something. You were eating apples only a few days ago.”

“Fruit is fruit. What’s the difference?”

I decide to play this delicate moment artfully and put on a charming smile as I approach. Despite her suspicions, she responds to my affectionate peck on the cheek and is too slow to stop my left hand as it makes a grab for the odiferous yellow splotch on her plate.

“Thieving brat.”

I munch cheerfully. Ah, durian, its exquisite melancholy decadence, its haunting viscous sensuality, its naked raw unashamed primeval pungency, its triumphantly morbid allure—oh, never mind,
farang,
no way you’ll understand durian without spending half a lifetime out here.

“It’s got to be the most fattening fruit in the world. Whatever
farang
concocted your diet has probably never even heard of it.”

“There’s an e-mail,” she says, not without a tone of relief. “He’s going to be delayed at least another week. Some case he’s got to be in the States for.”

May Buddha forgive me, I’d forgotten all about Superman. I rush to the PC and check the e-mail.

My dearest Nong and Sonchai, I’m so terribly sorry, but I’m going to be delayed. The Court of Appeals just informed me that they’ve moved one of my big three cases forward for hearing over the next few days. I’m representing one of the firm’s biggest clients and there’s just no way I can avoid being here for it. I’m going to come as soon as it’s over—and I mean as soon. I’m keeping a bag packed and I’m going straight from the office to the airport the minute the case ends. I’m burning up about you two. My god, Nong . . . My god (I love you too, Sonchai, even if we’ve never met).

I’m mulling this over (he said:
I love you,
but then he added
too
) when all of a sudden everyone freezes because two strangers have walked into the bar.

Well, not strangers exactly. America is certainly a tribal society, isn’t it? The effect they have on the old codgers in the bar makes me think of a couple of Cheyenne coming around a turning in a forest to find a band of Crow having lunch. Hudson and Bright and all the customers hitch their pants simultaneously. Hudson turns away from the wrinkled hippies with a sour look and stares me in the eye.

“Hello, Detective. Remember us?” Hudson says, almost without moving his lips, as hard, gaunt, and haunted as ever.

“Songai Kolok. You were businessmen at the time.”

“And you were an American resident with a green card. Let’s cut to the chase. You know why we’re here?”

Wordlessly I lead them out back. Hudson wrinkles his nose, and Bright sniffs ostentatiously.
(That’s a third-world stink if ever there was one.)

“Mother, these are the two CIA spies I met in Songai Kolok, when they were pretending to be businessmen in the telecommunications industry,” I explain in Thai.

Have I told you before that in our primitive society we still have courtesy? My mother takes my introduction as a signal that these two men are higher up the pyramid than she. She stands and
wais
them mindfully. Hudson, I think, wishes he had a hat to lift, and Bright is confused. He thinks about a
wai,
then gives up.

“You mean they lied to you?” my mother asks, still maintaining the polite smile.

“Lying is what they do. They’re spies.”

“How disgusting.” Nodding politely at Hudson. “Do they speak Thai?”

“Not a word.”

Returning Bright’s respectful nod with a beam. “Does the Colonel know about them? Are we going to bump them off?”

“Mother, please, that would not be a good idea. The CIA is quite powerful.”

“I don’t like the way that young one keeps sniffing at my durian. Maybe I’ll bump him off myself if he keeps doing that.” In English: “Gentlemen, do sit down, my house is your home.”

I see that Bright is not at all certain that it would be safe to sit in a place with such a pervasive odor. Bravely he pulls up a chair, though, and Hudson does the same. Hudson has not failed to notice that he is in the presence of an attractive Thai woman of about his age group. (I see a terrible bitterness that he would be prepared to melt down and recycle for the right lady, maybe a womanly Asian with courtesy and gentleness? Could this be her?)

“The older one fancies you.”

“D’you want me to seduce him, find out how much he knows?”

“You’re supposed to be retired.”

“The young one really thinks he’s the bee’s knees, doesn’t he? Shall we set one of the girls onto him? I don’t think he’ll look like that when we show him the video of his performance with his pants down.”

I have an expression of filial adoration on my face. “That’s really not a bad idea. Is room ten still rigged up?”

“Yes it is, despite your puritanical objections.”

Explanatory note: Dear Nong has never forgiven me for refusing to join a syndicate that broadcasts pay-by-the-minute porn over the Net, usually without the consent or knowledge of the erection owner. The secret digital camera was all rigged up and ready to go when I found out and put a stop to it.

“Who shall we ask? What is his profile?”

“Easily aroused, good basic performer with not much imagination, probably can keep it up for the full twenty minutes if he needs to, a jaw-grinder on the home stretch, a triumphalist, resents it if the lady doesn’t climax. We don’t want submissive, he’d only get arrogant and contemptuous. Someone smart and subtle who will drive him crazy:
Oh, I hope you’ll return soon, I get so horny when I don’t come, shall I get you some Viagra next time?
”