East of Suez (10 page)

“That was a very well-known character,” he said, after introducing himself as Colonel Prasit Ngamdee of the Takot Sûreté. He stood solid but not very tall in a summer-weight uniform. The mustache reminded me of that film actor, the late Ernie Kovacs. “Did he take any money? Not that you will likely get it back,” he said cynically.

“No.” I found myself trying to remember the name of my hotel and failing. I was actually beginning to feel chilly. “He … he only tried to get my camera bag, but the strap held … He didn’t get anything.” I wasn’t able to say this without a few stutters and false starts.

“You are fortunate I was in the shop next door getting a prescription filled.”

“My lucky day.”

“Do you intend to press charges?”

“He didn’t get anything. The poor fellow looks like he could use a good meal.”

“Another bleeding heart from America! How are we going to put people like this away if you won’t make a charge?” His English sounded all but colloquial. He took out a slim notebook and began looking for the first blank page. He sighed before asking his first question, as though the effort was too much for him. “Name?” he began, following through with a set list of questions. They led to a request for my passport and wallet, with which he made free. Since my wallet declared me to be a private investigator, I couldn’t pretend I was a holidaying dentist.

“So, I misjudged you! You are not an American bleeding heart but a Canadian bleeding heart.” He was smiling.

“The mistake was natural,” I said with a shrug to be polite.

“Why have you, a private investigator, come to my country, Mr Cooperman?”

“What do
you
tell people when
you
go on holiday? I’m hoping to do some diving off the reef while I’m here. I want to see the Pink Temple and the reclining Buddha. I want to walk along the beach without shoes on. I’m looking for some peace and relaxation, some swimming and good food.”

“You are not working in my country without a permit?”

“I don’t know anybody down here. I don’t see where a client might spring from. I’m on a holiday, recuperating from a bump on the head. People in plain clothes are vulnerable.”

“So, you are recuperating.”

“Can you think of a better place for it?”

“I have never been to Europe or America. One day, perhaps.”

“I want to thank you for coming to my rescue. Sorry, I can’t tell your rank. I come from a place in Canada about the same size as Takot but with a quarter of the local population. If you want to check with a couple of detectives in the Grantham, Ontario, police, I think they might put in a good word for me.” I gave him the names of my pals Savas and Staziak, which he inserted into his notebook. Closing his book, he began to smile.

“You Canadians are beginning to have real names. Once it was all Macdonald and Mackenzie.”

“We keep working at it. Do you?”

“Oh yes. It was a General MacMillan who won our war with the Thai army in 1934. He went from his horse to Government House. We were plagued with him for ten years.”

“And he was followed by McDonald. The McDonald of the American way.”

“Oh, Mr Cooperman, you misjudge us. We, on the whole,
like
the American way. We haven’t seen enough of the comfort and riches of the world to want to dismiss the McDonalds and Coca-Colas of the West. We are still reaping the benefits. They employ many of our people. Why would we complain?”

I looked over at the poor thief. “What’s going to happen to him?”

“Oh, we have a few outstanding warrants against him, but he has a second cousin who pulls some weight at a high level. I suspect he’ll be running around the streets in another week or so. For how long will you be with us?”

“I’ll be here for a week, with side trips along the coast and inland to see what tourists like me look at.”

“Perhaps we might have a drink one day?” He gave me a crisp white card with his name on it.

“Sure! I’d like that.” Then I had a sudden thought: “Did you get that prescription you came for?” He gave me a queer look. It lasted only a moment, then he was all smiles.

“Thank you! I had forgotten.” I gave him the name of my hotel when I found it and he extended his hand. He shook mine until his liver marks began to come loose. Another policeman, who had arrived by car, packed the old street thief into the back seat, but without the head-saving gesture I’ve seen so often on television. A day or so later, somebody told me that the people here do not touch the heads of others, because of the special status of the head as holier than the rest of the body. I pass the information on for what it’s worth. The poor fellow gave me a heartbreaking look before his face and the car disappeared out of sight. My new police contact waved before getting into another police car. Soon, all the lights and sirens were going into their act. I covered my ears, resting my back against the sun-baked wall of the café.

The car hadn’t quite vanished from my hearing when I realized that the policeman—I’d forgotten his name already—had not returned to the drugstore to pick up his prescription. Like a good boy, I went inside the store to ask the druggist whether—here I looked up the name on the card—Colonel Prasit Ngamdee had been in to get his medicine. The druggist checked his records, but could find nothing. Had Ngamdee been following me, I wondered. His arrival at the scene of my near-mugging was most opportune. I played with the notion for a minute as I made a purchase of razor blades. I didn’t like the idea that my cover had been blown so quickly, so early in my enterprise. I shrugged it off, added a chocolate bar to my total purchase, and left.

Before continuing down the street, I took my left arm from my jacket and slipped the camera bag’s strap over my shoulder. When I had the jacket on properly again, the camera bag hardly showed at all.

I continued down the street. The store windows were bright along this block. They helped to calm me down. They reminded me of home. Here, through metal-meshed windows, were TV sets with familiar Western faces in the reruns glimpsed through the glass. Computer stores that could have been on Yonge Street in Toronto gave me a kind of hope that there wouldn’t be another ambush further down the street. Still, I wasn’t so deluded that I thought myself back home. While the merchandise in the store windows was Western in look, although probably manufactured not many miles from where I was standing, the style of display, the crowded windows, kept reminding me of where I was. My brush with the sneak thief hadn’t soured me on this town, but it put me on edge. I wasn’t the relaxed world-traveler who had just got off the plane. I’d got into enough trouble for one day, so I made a tactical retreat to my hotel and my bed.

SEVEN

I GOT THROUGH THE NEXT DAY
with a combination of window shopping and noshing in the cafés. I stretched out these expeditions with naps in my room, which helped put me on local time. I began to think about the various kinds of head coverings around me. Each one probably told volumes about the wearer. Head scarves and knitted caps, straw coolies and turbans. They all had me guessing. My street wandering was buttressed with many pillow monologues. Funny how the sour, dive-bombing sound of the mosquito is the same the world over, while, I hear, frog noises change from place to place. My informant said that Aristophanes wouldn’t recognize a Texas frog or even one from Brooklyn. I was getting used to the idea that wherever skin touched skin, perspiration followed. I was reminded of this again while I cleaned melted chocolate from the inside of my pocket. That got me thinking once more of my friend the local cop. He was becoming sand in my Jell-O.

In the streets, vendors with trays or baskets of cold fingerfood plied their trade on the sidewalks. Others, with steaming pots, offered me everything from Pad Thai noodles to fried scorpions and other bugs to eat. Interesting smells followed me everywhere. I found that I was beginning to like the life of the streets: the noise, the commerce, the bustle.

Somewhere in here, the day changed. I had had a serious sleep and the sun was turning the walls of the building opposite whiter than white. I had treated myself to a meal of local things I didn’t dare quiz the waiter too closely about and had wandered back to the hotel without incident. Street thieves notwithstanding, I was starting to get a feel for this place. I was beginning to know where things were located and how far they were from one another. Space was sorting itself out in my troubled brain, but time was another matter. I was already becoming vague about how long I had been in Takot. Was it yesterday I had arrived or was it the day before? I looked at my bed for an answer. I had had a long time-catchup sleep and then last night’s. Did I tell you that already? This had to be the morning of my second day. Or was it the third? This was the day before I was going to dive the reef offshore.
Tuesday
, by my pocket calendar. But you know about time away from home. Every day is a holiday. In fact, it was like this sprawling city was an extension of my floor back at the hospital. I hardly ever knew the day there either. I tried to remember the name of yesterday’s policeman. And there was a girl’s name too, wasn’t there? Another diver, another Westerner?

I got the hotel to call me a taxi. One of those
tip-tops
or whatever they call them. I was told that I’d have to settle for a regular taxi.
Tuk-tuks
were available only on the street. (I think I heard that.) I watched out the window for a normal small European car to drive up to the door.

The driver looked to be twelve or thirteen, but wore the same dark glasses that most of the other drivers affected. He held the door for me, like I was a
somebody
. I enjoyed that. Except for a few sharp turns, an abrupt stop or two, and circumnavigating the marooned freighter, we rode down to the harbor without incident. At the edge of the ocean, the Andaman Sea to be precise, at least you knew where you were.

I’ve always responded to boats and ships of all kinds. The activity of a busy port or waterfront was always stimulating. The taxi, an old Ford, sent clouds of white exhaust along the road behind us. Since I had no official destination, I paid off the driver and decided to walk a bit. Actually, I decided first and
then
paid the driver. I still get sequences mixed up in my head. In general, I had to admit, this trip was agreeing with me. Since I knew I was a stranger here, I wasn’t always straining to remember when I’d been here before. My cracked skull and the new streets sorted well together.

There were wooden buildings along the harbor, some of them supported by pilings that rose from the water. They looked black in the sun, as did most of the weather-beaten wood the warehouses and shipping company buildings were made of. Here and there, new woodwork showed scars of the tidal wave, the tsunami, or whatever they called it.

The sun was embarrassingly high over the mountains. Most of the people along the docks had likely been working for hours. I watched them packing up fish from the fishermen’s yellow plastic barrels, while others were folding nets or spreading them out to dry on the sand beach.

A small crowd had gathered on the shore below where I was walking, so I made my way down from the pavement, across a scrubby incline, to the beach proper. I soon had sand in my shoes. Others were joining the crowd as I did myself. We wanted to know what the fuss was all about.

Spread out along the waterline was a giant squid. Most of it looked like a ton of raw liver, but the rubbery tentacles were the giveaway. The suckers on the twisted loops of tentacles were over an inch across. Their color also reminded me of raw liver. There was no sign of what had killed it, and it hadn’t been caught in one of the fishing nets further down the beach. Just one of those mysteries the sea throws up from time to time. A reject from fifty fathoms down. I looked at it as I would have looked at a visitor from another planet. It seemed to hit my fellow gawkers the same way.

“
Architeuthis!
” a voice said beside me. It belonged to a young woman in a T-shirt and shorts. She was bronzed by the sun and her hair was as blond as corn silk. “Isn’t she beautiful!”

It’s unnerving to have your very thought stolen from you even as it is forming. Only she meant the raw meat on the shoreline. “She belongs to the Cephalopoda, same family as garden snails. Poor dear, she’s got all twisted in her prehensile arms.”

“Those long sticky things?”

“Right.”

“I thought they were sex organs. That’s a relief.”

She turned to look at me: at first seriously, like I was a slug on a microscope slide, then she broke into a broad smile.

“I’m Fiona Calaghan,” she said. “Who are you?”

I told her, and she tried my name on her tongue a few times before she was ready to collect the rest of my basic information.

“You’re a friend of the priest, Father What’s-his-name.”

“Father O’Mahannay. That’s right.”

“He wants to hear from you. He thinks you’re putting your immortal soul in hock to the powers of darkness. Call him.”

“I’m glad somebody’s worried about it. I’ve been too busy. How do you know him?”

I told her I was on holiday, that I’d shared a taxi with her friend the priest on the way from the airport.