Necropath (5 page)

Chandra sighed. “Okay. I want you to question her, find out if she noticed anything. Talk to the neighbours. You know the routine. I want a report ready by the next shift. Did the experts come up with anything?”

Vishi passed him a screader. “Everything’s in here.”

There was a tap at the door. A white-coated Indian poked his head into the room. “The clean-up boys,” Chandra said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

On the way back to headquarters, Chandra put the screader on read-out and listened to the monotonous computer voice as it reeled off the gruesome statistics. In his office, he downloaded the contents of the screen into Sinton’s files, added a brief report of his own, and sat at his desk for a minute.

He was about to leave for home when he recalled Vaughan.

He tapped the telepath’s code into his handset. It was almost four, and the first light of dawn was making grey rectangles of his office window. If Vaughan kept to his old routine, he should still be up.

He got through to Vaughan. The telepath looked tired beyond words, haggard and desperate—the type of character you would not wish to establish eye contact with in a crowd.

He told Vaughan about Weiss, then signed off, quit his office, and took the flier home. First, he would grab a few hours’ sleep, then enjoy a leisurely breakfast. Sumita was due back from the university at noon today, and he’d promised to take her out that afternoon.

As he piloted the flier towards the blood-red dawn, he considered his wife and tried to push images of the dead man to the back of his mind.

* * * *

DEAR SISTER

Another Bangkok night.

Sukara’s day started at eight in the evening. Her ancient Mickey Mouse alarm clock detonated on the table beside her bunk, drilling its din into her dream-filled sleep. Half awake, she swung her legs out of bed, searching for her sandals with her toes. She smacked the clock silent and hung her head between her knees. All the alcohol she’d consumed last night had not made her drunk, but she had a throbbing headache and her mouth was dry and sore. She reached out and opened the door of her cooler, dragged out a bulb of orange juice and drank.

Her room was just a little wider than the narrow bunk it contained; from the bed, she could reach everything she needed: cooler, cooker, vid-screen, the spirit-house in the corner and the shelves that held her clothes, the knick-knacks and ornaments her customers had bought her over the years. She’d rented the room six months ago, paying a thousand baht for the year’s lease. Before that she’d lived with three other girls in a damp room over the Siren Bar, but every other night she’d fallen out with the girls and sometimes they’d put things in her bed: a live toad, a dead rat, a mirror, and, once—this was what had finally driven her out—a small, perfectly curled human turd, which Sukara had nearly poked with her toes as she was climbing into bed. She’d hurried downstairs to Fat Cheng, the Chinese owner of the bar, and yelled at him in pain and frustration.

Fat Cheng had heard her out, then said in English, “You good girl, little Monkey. I tell other girls they no good. Any more, they go.” He shook his head. “First this, then that.”

“Other girls, they no like little Monkey! It no good you just tell them. I go, find own place!”

And she’d taken her belongings and tramped the streets for two days before she found a room for rent on the other side of the city. Its size, when she had finally dragged all her possessions up the five flights of stairs, had almost made her weep. But she’d made shelves and stacked things on top of other things and covered the walls with graphics of alien worlds, and in a couple of days the room was comfortable and cosy and somewhere she could call home.

No more bitchiness from the other girls, no more unpleasant things in her bed, no whispers from the other side of the room when she undressed and they saw the strange, sucker-shaped markings on her torso.

Not that this room was a palace. The electricity stopped just when she needed it, and the noise from the traffic in the street below at dusk and dawn was deafening, and it took her two hours to get across the city to the Siren Bar, and that was travelling on the metro. But it was her own place she could come back to in the morning after a hard night, and fall asleep watching films on the vid-screen.

All in all, for a working girl just turned twenty-two, she had done well for herself.

She pulled a basin of water from under the bunk and splashed her face, took off her T-shirt, and washed beneath her arms. She turned on the vid and listened to the news while she dried her legs and feet—just to get the grime off her body. She’d get a proper shower when she got to work.

The news report turned to politics and she turned off the screen. A politician’s fat face was replaced by her own reflection, and she turned her head away and closed her eyes, gasping. There were no mirrors in her room. She had thrown out her mirror three years ago, after the madman had attacked her with a knife. He had shouted he wanted to cut her open from the top of her head right down to her crotch, like a mango, but he had only got part of the way. She had been so close to being dead. She wondered if her picture would have been on the vid-news. “Working girl Sukarapatam sliced from top to bottom like a ripe fruit!”

Fat Cheng had been good about it. He’d had her rushed to a people’s hospital, and had paid half the bills—the other half he’d taken from Sukara’s wages. He’d even come to see her in the hospital. He’d grabbed her chin, turning her face this way and that. “Damage goods, little Monkey. Who pay for you now? Always in trouble, this and that.”

“You pay top surgeon, he mend face. Make beautiful.”

And Fat Cheng had roared with laughter. “Beautiful! Wise man says, ‘Can’t turn frog into songbird.’ You too dark, have monkey face, little Monkey. Now you scarred good.”

“You throw me out, Fat Cheng?” 

He’d turned her head painfully, right and left, scowling. “You do, little Monkey. Some men, they like damage goods.”

Sukara pulled on a short black skirt, a clean red T-shirt. She flicked on her lighter, opened the glass door of the spirit-house, and lit a candle, placing a piece of banana beside it as an offering. She tipped her head forward and murmured a short prayer. “No violence today, no bad things. Spirits guide me, I promise to be good.”

She found her mask, to keep out the filthy city air, and slipped it over her head. She preferred the type that fitted over her nose and mouth, covering more of her scar than just the mouth-masks. With her long hair falling over the rest of the face, she hoped that people wouldn’t notice.

She turned off the light in the room, locked the door behind her and hurried down the dark stairs. The street was a solid caravan of cars and trucks, fumes hanging low. Advertising lights were coming on in the dusk. Overhead, fliers screamed like wronged spirits, tail lights blurred in the pollution.

She made it in good time to the station and caught the trans-Bangkok express to the station closest to the Chao Phraya river. Sukara hung on a strap, squashed between two fat men. The trip took just over two hours and she wished she’d brought along a comic to pass the time. Instead she closed her eyes and thought about her sister, and invented a fantastic future in which her sister met a rich, handsome man who took her to a colony planet and they had lots of children and were happy. She ran this fantasy almost every day, with variations, and the variation she played today was that her sister visited Earth and found Sukara and said, “Come back and live with us.” She smiled to herself, both at how wonderful that would be, and also how unlikely. She told herself that she should not think of herself in these fantasies—they were fantasies for her sister, and if she wished too hard for things to happen for herself, then they might not come true for her sister.

And then the train reached the Chao Phraya, and Sukara struggled out and up the escalator to the street.

Lights advertised bars and strip clubs and brothels. The street was full of strolling men, the occasional working girl in heels and strip rags and little else. No one glanced twice at Sukara as she hurried down the street, and she felt safe, anonymous. These were the times when she was glad she wasn’t beautiful, when her beauty would have attracted the eyes of the cruising
farang
men.

She came to the entrance of the Siren Bar and climbed the rickety wooden stairs. The bar and dance floor and the other rooms, the mirrored rooms and the cubicles and the poolrooms, were built out over the river. Sometimes, in the early hours when business was bad and the music stopped, she could hear the scummy water of the river sloshing about under the floorboards, and Sukara would play the fantasy that she was aboard a boat sailing downriver into the bay of Bangkok.

Fat Cheng was in his usual seat at the bar. He swivelled when he saw her, great bulges of white-shirted fat pressed through the chromium struts of the barstool. She wondered how his slit eyes could see through so much flesh.

“Little Monkey, you late, girl.”

She pulled off her mask. “Train slow, Fat Cheng.”

“Hokay. You go get shower, customer waiting.”

Sukara felt a quick disappointment that she would have no time to herself, then a surge of curiosity. “Who, Fat Cheng? You know him?”

“Regular, little Monkey. Ee-tee.”

“Which Ee-tee?”

“I don’t know which Ee-tee. I didn’t ask name. Now you go get shower, hurry up.”

She ran through the bar. One of the girls, the tall, beautiful, sophisticated women who chatted to businessmen and politicians about world affairs— then ended up flat on their backs getting fucked like every other working girl—saw Sukara and hissed in imitation of some leering extraterrestrial.

Sukara ignored her and scurried to the showers.

While she soaped herself, luxuriating beneath the pounding needles of hot water, she remembered the standpipe under which she and her sister had washed when they were little girls. Stripped down to their knickers and sharing a cracked sliver of soap between them, they had laughed and played under the great surging column of cold water. Those had been good times, life in a small village on the border with Cambodia, and she wondered how it had come to this. So many things might have happened to make things different. Their mother had died when Sukara was five, and she had looked after her sister while their father worked in the fields. She took Pakara to school with her in the mornings, a little sleeping bundle strapped to her back, and then worked in the fields with her father in the afternoons. Later, when Sukara was twelve, she worked in a small factory in a neighbouring town, sewing dresses for the city while Pakara worked with her father. She wished that she could have worked in the fields instead of the factory, but her father said that they needed the money. Sukara resented her sister the privilege of being with her father in the afternoons, and grew jealous of the close relationship that had developed between her father and Pakara over the years. Her little sister was the pretty one, lighter skinned than Sukara and with big, round eyes, unlike Sukara’s Chinese eyes. She was her father’s favourite; that much was obvious. He said that she reminded him of her mother. Sukara told herself that it was not her sister’s fault, and that she should not feel jealous because of it.

She would never forget the day a farm labourer rushed into the factory and told her that her father was dead—killed in the blades of a tractor’s plough. She remembered her reaction—a sadness, yes, but at the same time a stomach-churning apprehension about what would happen next.

Her father owed money to the landowner he had worked for, gambling debts he had never told his daughters about. Sukara sold their hut, but
still
they owed money. Her wages were taken from her every week, and her sister was forced to work in the fields all day. They lived in a communal hut on the farm, eating just two meagre meals a day. Pakara was often beaten for not working hard enough, and Sukara set off to work in the factory before dawn and did not get home until after dark. For years and years she hardly saw the sun.

It was Pakara’s idea to run away. One night, after watching a film on the communal vid-screen about a young boy who worked his way up from being a beggar to owning a factory in Bangkok, Pakara had said to Sukara, “We must leave here. Tomorrow night we take the train to Trat. Then we take another train to Bangkok. I know times, okay? Don’t worry.” Sukara had agreed, nodded her head in wordless wonder at her little sister’s audacity.

She was sixteen when she saw Bangkok for the first time, Pakara just ten. The films had not prepared her for the noise and the smell and the crowds of the city. Pakara had managed to steal fifty baht from the commune kitty, but even eating just one meal a day it soon ran out. They walked the streets in the tourist area of Patphong, begging for money and food. For two nights they slept in alleys, growing hungrier as the hours passed. There were other street kids begging too, and others who went with rich
farangs.
Her sister watched them, then dragged Sukara to the bar where the street kids worked. Her little sister talked to the owner, and then miraculously they were given a meal and a hot shower, and told to sit at a table in the bar. Men came and talked to them, bought them drinks, strange bitter tasting stuff that made Sukara laugh, and then be sick. Late that night an old Westerner took Pakara’s hand and led her from the bar. Pakara gestured for Sukara to follow, and whispered to the
farang,
who glanced at Sukara and didn’t seem pleased that she was coming too. He took them to a hotel room and, while Sukara watched, he undressed her sister and made her do things to him that Sukara could not believe that anyone would want done to them, or that her sister knew how to do.