The Godfather of Kathmandu (11 page)

I was too rushed to describe the bar properly to you before,
farang
. It’s a great barnlike structure of the type used to house small modern industries and supermarkets—basically a tin roof on an iron frame with walls added and a great oblong bar in the middle of the enclosed space. What I have always admired is the way the strict Buddhist owners have preserved a sacred ficus tree, which somehow rises through the roof and is the primary source of luck for the girls, who rarely fail to bring lotus buds and
wai
the tree before they sit at the bar and work on being irresistible. I’m a little embarrassed that at least half of them know me and say hi and
wai
me as we walk in, but the good Sukum again shows his generous side. “I know you have shares in one of Colonel Vikorn’s brothels. I know your mother runs it and also has shares in it. You must know lots of working girls.”

“Let’s be frank, Detective—my mother was on the Game. That’s the only reason I got enough education to be a cop. It’s the only reason I’m still alive.”

At the words
on the Game
, Sukum snaps his face away from me, leaving me the back of his head with its crop of spiky ink-black hair. I’m thinking,
I’ve really done it now and maybe he wont be able to work with me anymore, I’m just too weird
, when he says, still looking away at the tree shrine, “How can you say that? How can you just come out with it like that, as if it doesn’t matter?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shock you. I was just being frank, that’s all.”

“No, no, no.” He raises both palms to press his cheeks. Then in a whispered hiss:
“My mother was too
. That’s what has made me so petty. It was because I let rip with the sex instinct in a previous lifetime that my mother was a whore in this one. I feel I can never express who I really am in this lifetime. Even
I
think it’s weird the way I obsess about my car, when it’s just an ordinary Toyota. How can you rise above your karma so easily?”

Buddha knows where this might have led if Marli—stage name: Madonna—did not come over to join us. She is joined in turn by Sarli, Nik, Tonni, and Pong. They all once worked at my mother’s bar, where I still occasionally work as
papasan
. Girls grow out of dancing on stage at an early point in their careers; most don’t like to do it after the age of about
twenty-seven, at which point they graduate to less strenuous forms of self-promotion, often going freelance right here at the Rose Garden. I introduce them all to Sukum, who, I know, is trying hard not to see his mother in their faces.

“Sonchai, so long since we’ve seen you, what are you doing here? Are you looking for girls to dance at the Old Man’s Club?”

“Sonchai, dear
papasan
, will you buy me a drink?”

I order beers all around. “I’m working,” I say. “You must have heard about the
farang
murder at the flophouse on Soi Four/Four?”

They all immediately drop their eyes—whether out of respect for the memory of a valued customer or fear of bad luck is hard to say. I nod to Sukum, who fishes out a navy-blue passport with an eagle on the front. It is hardly necessary to show them the photo.

“We were so shocked.”

“He was such a good customer.”

“He came about four times a year. He was a good payer. A really nice guy.”

“What was great was the way he would usually take two or more of us, so it was fun.”

“He was funny about being fat. He would say,
You get on top, honey, I’m scared of flattening you
. He wasn’t, you know, the other kind of
farang.”

“That’s right. He wasn’t
neua.” Neua
means “north;” we use it to describe people who suffer from a superiority complex.

“Did he take you to a luxury apartment or a flophouse?” Sukum wants to know. He still can’t get it out of his head that someone would waste money on a flophouse; it wasn’t as if the
farang
had a wife or live-in lover back at the penthouse.

“It would depend. He would get the hots for a girl sometimes for a month, then he would take her back to his penthouse on Soi Eight. But most of the time, when he was just playing the field, he would use the flophouse. I guess he didn’t want people at the penthouse to know about his appetite.”

“It was incredible. Of course, he used the blue pill a lot. He was one of those
farang
who always have to stick their dicks in someone or other. He was an addict for sure.”

“If you did a good job he would tip double, sometimes triple.”

“What’s a good job?” Sukum asks with sudden urgency.

“Oh, nothing particular. Some customers can be sensitive. He was one of those. Maybe he was a bit pathetic, you know? He always wanted you to like him, maybe even love him, when you knew it was only for a couple of hours and then he’d want the next one to love him. If you did it in that way, though, like you were a real lover and not just a twenty-minute fuck, he would pay double. After a while every girl here knew that about him, so we all turned into passionate lovers when he hired us. It was kind of fun in a way.”

“Even in a group he was like that?”

“Oh, yes. Once on his birthday he broke his own rule and took a whole bunch of us back to his penthouse. It had a giant Jacuzzi, and we all got in with him and he was like the emperor of China with his adoring harem around him. There were ten of us altogether, the bar was almost deserted.” Titters at this.

“Did he, ah, do it with all ten?” Sukum wants to know.

Marli frowns in concentration. “I’m not sure. I know he screwed me that night.”

“And me.”

“And me.”

“And me.”

“That only makes four,” Sukum says with a kind of relief.

“But we all gave him blow jobs. That was standard.”

“He wasn’t into any kind of sadism, or masochism?” I ask.

All the girls shake their heads, one after the other. “He was a totally normal sex addict. He never talked about his life back in California, but you got the feeling it was pretty miserable. He was the kind you feel sorry for and want to help, you know? Not the aggressive type at all.”

“Real sex addicts never are. I mean, the ones who act it out like that.”

“That’s right. It’s the serious ones you have to be careful about, the ones who probably masturbate all the time and get all intense and stuck on one girl. The ones who fall in love are always the dangerous ones. I wouldn’t think he ever needed to masturbate in his life. He was so rich, there was always someone to do it for him.”

I let a couple of beats pass while we all drink beers, except Sukum, who sticks to mineral water. “Well,” I say, “who has been with him this week?”

Sukum and I watch intently while the girls all exchange looks and
shrugs. “None of us. We hadn’t seen him in here for a couple of months, even though we knew he was in Bangkok because we used to see him in the street.”

“With girls?”

“No, but you can bet he was using another bar. No way he could live without sex.”

All this time Pong has been playing with the American’s passport, because she was the last to look at it, and Sukum has yet to ask for it back. To break the silence, Pong says, “Look at this giant visa, it takes up a whole page. It’s really beautiful. And there’s another. And another. I can’t read English. What country is it for?”

I grab the passport to examine the visa. “The Kingdom of Nepal,” I say.

There’s no reason to connect the dead American with Tietsin just because he visited Nepal a few times. You need to be qualified in the finer nuances of superstition to understand my frame of mind when we leave the Rose Garden and head for the flophouse on Soi 4/4. What the circumstantial evidence is pointing at, you see, is my personal connection with Nepal. The cosmos is telling me there’s no way out; I’m stuck with Tietsin and his mantra whether I like it or not. Anyway, I lead Sukum out of the bar and down a narrow alley filled with cooked-food stalls, which cater to the girls who work the bars. There are a few sitting at the tables who eye us as prospects when we pass. One, a new girl I’ve never seen before, tells me she loves me. Sincerity is the first casualty of capitalism.

We emerge out of the alley into Soi 5, which is famous for the Food-land supermarket, which also offers a small eatery, open 24/7 except on Buddhist holidays. (If ever you want to meet a girl when the bars are closed,
farang
, you know where to go, thanks to Jitpleecheep Personal Tours.) We now emerge into Sukhumvit, turn right past Starbucks with the girls hanging around outside—it’s a favorite
farang
haunt, after all—keep the bookshop on our right and the martial-arts/porn stalls on our left, then find ourselves waiting at the famous intersection with Soi 4. All trades around here—the bars, the bookstalls, the hairdressers, the food stalls, the clothing stalls, the DVD stalls, the hotels, and the cops—thrive thanks to the cornucopia of business opportunities created by the most ancient profession. The girls on these streets might be despised in the
larger society, but you’ll find most locals being polite to them. Looking a gift horse in the mouth is a definite no-no for anyone sensitive to the nuances.

We manage to cross the road at considerable risk to our lives, say hello to our brother cops manning the traffic-control box on the other side of the Suk, then pass the bars and cooked-food stalls of Soi 4 before we finally turn into Subsoi 4. At the flophouse we find two bored security guards sitting outside at a tubular steel table playing Thai checkers with bottle tops. They don’t challenge us, so we pass on into the reception area, which uses a minimum of space on the ground floor. The
katoey
behind the desk is tall, maybe six feet, seriously overweight (long hair tied back in a ponytail; mascara and rouge), and of the kind whose personality did not improve after he had his goolies cut off. He is also smart, sees we are cops before we open our mouths, and decides not to help.

“We’re investigating the murder of the
farang
Frank Charles.”

The
katoey
rolls his eyes. “Not
again
. I thought that was all
over?”

“It’s not over. We’d like to ask you how often he visited here.”

“I’ve been told by my management that all inquiries must go through legal channels.”

“We are your legal channel,” Sukum explains.

“Lawyers,”
the
katoey
says with a sneer. “Talk to the lawyers.”

Sukum may be shy when it comes to dealing with
farang
bars and the girls who service them, but here he recognizes a type he knows well. “Do you really want to make us angry?” he asks in a voice of polite intimidation. This has raised the
katoey
’s hackles and now we have a standoff waiting to happen. I touch Sukum’s arm. “Later,” I tell him. To the
katoey
I say, “Give us the keys to the room,” in the kind of voice all cops know how to use. He hands them over with a sulky shrug and we make for the lifts.

There is a romantic couple behind us at the reception desk: a
farang
in his late fifties with a Thai girl in her early twenties. The
farang
rents a room for two hours and pays in advance while we’re waiting. They join us in the tiny elevator, and the entire journey from ground to fourth is spent in a tense, precoital silence. There is something fascinating about two strangers who have decided to have sex together within perhaps five minutes of the first encounter. When they get out at the same floor as ours, I cannot help watching them at the door of their room, the man fumbling with the keys, the girl staring at the floor.

“Come on,” Sukum says.

While we are walking down the corridor, I fish out my cell phone to call Lek and tell him to get over here and talk to the
katoey
on reception. Now Sukum is jealous because he doesn’t have a local
katoey
scout of his own.

In the room where the fat
farang
died they have cleaned up the blood lake and taken the corpse away, but they left just about everything else. No rotary saw or other instruments were found by the forensic team. I automatically make for the bookshelves. The books and screenplays are all still there, although they have been dusted for prints. According to the forensic boys, there were no prints on the books other than the victim’s. As for the rest of the room: sure, prints everywhere, from a thousand different sets of fingers. What do you expect? It’s a flophouse.

It’s the books, of course, which intrigue, fascinate, and baffle me. If not for them, the case might be classified as some bizarre Oriental copycat murder based on a rather literal third-world interpretation of the Western noir tradition. The books make no such assumption possible. I’m afraid they make the whole crime incomprehensible the minute you attempt to profile the perpetrator. On the one hand, we have here as extreme a murder as you could possibly imagine; on the other, there’s not a sign of ungoverned rage, the decision to mutilate the human form apparently sustained with surgical discipline. The victim was disemboweled with a single careful incision from solar plexus to lower abdomen; his guts flopped out because he was so obese. Similarly, the whole of his upper cranium had been removed, but the surgery was carried out with considerable care and skill—the pathologist has explained that it is not easy to keep the saw steady without practice. Most telling of all, there are no irrational slashings or stabbings, which may have indicated a psychopathic disorder in the killer. All of this might have been explained away on the grounds that we simply do not have enough information about the perp; but we do: we have the books s/he used as a blueprint. But why? Surely not as a manual? Someone, obviously, is trying to tell us something. And then, of course, there is the small matter of cannibalism.

Now that they have been dusted I am able to pick up the books one by one:
The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal
, an Edgar Allan Poe short-story collection, including “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and—what a coincidence!—
The Godfather
, by Mario Puzo.