The Godfather of Kathmandu (20 page)

“It’s all just appetite,” he says, glaring at the bust. Then, like a good Buddhist, he turns his anger on himself. “This is where
farang
are leading us, isn’t it? Like me with my Toyota. If I had money I would fall into this trap, just the same. And maybe end up like him, thoroughly lost in an ego dream.”

I smile because he has jumped way ahead of me. I did not directly link the American’s narcissism to the exotic manner of his dying, I have too much
farang
blood for that; but to Sukum, who has no overview other than Buddhism, the operation of the law of cause and effect is obvious. I think he loses all motivation to find the killer for a moment, because, after all, the perp was the victim of nothing more or less than the inexorable law of karma. And also, just for the moment, the demon of ambition has quite deserted him, leaving only disgust. Now I’m seeing the penthouse with Sukum’s eyes. It’s the detail, the extraordinary effort by talented tradesmen and interior designers, the obscenely expensive
perfection
of the place which represents a blasphemous waste of energy and time by all concerned.

Then his mind, stretched to the end of its elastic, flips back to his factory settings. He turns almost aggressively to the receptionist. “Did the deceased own a car?”

“Yes, a Lexus.”

“What model?”

“The LS 460—top of the range.” Clearly she, too, has the Bangkok automobile virus.

“What color?”

“Gray with metallic finish.”

“Did he ever drive you in it?”

“Once he gave me a lift to the end of the road. It was like floating on air.”

Sukum nods solemnly, takes another glance at the bust, and shakes his head. He has inspired me, though, and I start to hunt around the penthouse.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something incongruous.”

Sukum has revealed to me an inadvertent flaw in the place: it is flawless. This is not natural; there must be something that does not fit, something that reveals whatever lays behind the American’s extravagance, something driving the self-hate that resulted in his obesity. I find it surprisingly easily, in the corniest of places: under a pillow in the master bedroom.
The Dark Night of the Soul
, by St. John of the Cross. I hold it by the spine upside down to see which pages the deceased most favored. It opens naturally at of the Peers translation. A thick horizontal pencil mark draws attention to the last paragraph of Book I, Chapter III:

When I try to figure out what resonance those words have for me, I find Tietsin’s blade wheel lurking in the shadows of my mind. At the back of the book someone has written in pencil,
This burden is very hard to bear
. Curiously, there is a date: September 21, 2007. Why would anyone bother to date a cry from the soul? Because (I check his passport again) it was his birthday. He was a Virgo on the cusp of Libra and exactly sixty years old when he wrote those words, assuming it is his handwriting. In the Chinese system, he was born in the Year of the Fire Boar; Fire Boars are horny and lucky with money.

So far I have not examined the computer in the bedroom that served as an office. When I do so, I find I need an entry code. What I am most interested in is e-mail messages which might not be downloaded onto the PC but could equally well be hanging out there in cyberspace requiring another code to access them. I decide to leave the computer to the forensic boys.

Back on the ground floor, Sukum resists the temptation to go look at the Lexus, and I ask the building manager to check with the company that
runs the surveillance cameras to provide video copies of everyone who entered Frank Charles’s apartment over the past six months.

Sukum hangs next to me, apostate, and watches the residents come and go. Most are not
farang
, but neither are they Thai. The majority seem to be Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese, with plenty of Japanese, too. For the most part the
farang
residents do not seem to be American, but rather wealthy Swiss and German. They all have about them the careless sangfroid of the impenetrably rich, which was perhaps the only club to which Frank Charles could possibly have belonged. I think about that and ask the building manager to also provide statements from his staff that would enable us to identify regular visitors during the entirety of his residence. The manager checks his records and informs us the
farang
bought the apartment about five years ago and spent about half the year here in intervals of about two months at a time. A casual questioning of his staff suggests the American had very few visitors—perhaps none at all except when he brought girls back, which he did rarely, although there was a night when he arrived drunk at the head of a convoy of three taxis carrying ten young women whom the night staff automatically classified as prostitutes because of their Isaan accents. In accordance with the building’s strict security rules, copies of their ID cards were kept and will be made available to us as soon as they have been retrieved from the archives.

“Ten,” I say. The number, which did not seem out of the ordinary in the Rose Garden, now strikes me as grotesque.

“To go with the apartment and the Lexus,” Sukum says.

Forget men with long magic fingers who listen to the subtle sounds of locking mechanisms with mystic concentration; forget explosives, too. There’s only one sane way to bust open a safe in someone’s home: oxyacetylene. And for that you need steel bottles—one for the oxygen and one for the acetylene—some sheet steel to protect the floor, a guy in leathers with a giant cutting torch and a full face mask—and you need to move all the furniture out of the way.

Half of reception have come up to watch, and I couldn’t very well exclude Sukum and Lek. Women squeal while men grunt at the great cascade of sparks as the oxygen eats the iron. The cutter is making a circle around the safe’s lock, which glows dull red. The safe is of the kind you can buy on the main street, and not particularly strong. Even so, hardened steel plate doesn’t yield that easily, and I’m wondering if there is going to be anything left inside not charred to a cinder, when the door finally swings open a couple of inches and we are left standing in the particle-charged air with that peculiar stench of burnt iron. Now everyone is looking at me. The cutter hands me a thick wad of leather to use to open the red-hot door. The heat is pretty intense, but localized. What I’m most interested in is a DVD case in the bottom right corner. I gingerly put my hand into the oven, pull the case out. It’s only slightly molten, but when I open it, I see the DVD inside has curled with the heat. No way it’s going to even fit into a DVD player, and the microscopic laser etchings on the plastic will have been destroyed. There is no label on the disc, but
someone has written on it in felt-tip pen: “Nepal/Tibet 2001/2.” There is nothing else in the body of the safe except for a sheet of paper that looks as if it had personal identity codes written in hand, but is now too burnt and brown to decipher.

When I show the disc to the forensic boys, they shake their heads. DVDs are not like computer hard drives; you can’t reconstitute them. I say, “Okay, at least check out the computer, see if we can get into that and onto the Net.”

So now we’re in the
farang’s
office with the generic tower PC and seventeen-inch monitor; one of the forensic boys has brought a laptop with code-busting software, which he’s all excited about; he’s never used it before on a real case. We all watch while he attaches a cable from the laptop to the PC, switches on the PC, and red and green lights on the laptop start to pop on and off at an amazing rate. Then the Windows XP screen appears.

We all
koo
dutifully as the kid with the laptop grins. Trouble is, we don’t know the code for Internet access, and although we know Frank Charles used Gmail, Yahoo!, and a couple of other engines, we don’t know which one he favored for personal matters, or what the log-on code might be. The kid says his software won’t work on Internet access, the security is too good. I keep quiet, but make a private note to ask Kimberley to help; she has a whole raft of nerds at her command in Virginia, and since the deceased was American, I guess there is a good enough excuse to bust his privacy rights, which he won’t be needing anymore. While I’m thinking, the kid checks out the Windows address book. “Look,” he says to me, and points. I stare. There I am: name, title, address—

with my cell phone number and e-mail address.

Everyone looks at me, and I know that Sukum and Lek are both thinking this has to do with the private position I hold in Vikorn’s organization. I myself am merely dumfounded.

I’m also stung. Embarrassment and fear spur me into action. (If he knew my name and address, what else did he know?) There are things you pick up in ten years of detection that lie in the back of your mind, little techniques you’ve forgotten twenty times already, but which come back
when you’ve convinced yourself the case is worth the extra effort. It’s true, I’d not been treating the Fat
Farang
murder as if it were my own case—until now. I stride back into the bedroom and grab the leather wad to open the safe door again. It has cooled a lot, although it is still too hot to touch. I use the leather to spring open a semisecret tray in the top of the safe, then use one of my own keys to flick out a small metal box, which lands on the protective iron cover the welder has laid on the floor and bursts open. Naturally, we all stare. The contents of the box appear to be small rough stones of a grayish hue. One of the women from reception has gone to the bathroom and returned with a glass of water, which I pore gently over the stones. To the touch they are surprisingly hard, but small and unattractive, the translucent gray of shrimp before they are boiled. I shrug. It is difficult to see what connection they could have with the spectacular murder of Frank Charles. The stones strike me more like something you might pick up on a beach during a seaside vacation, put in your safe, and forget about. They are too small, ugly, and colorless to be precious.

I shake my head and tell Sukum I’ve seen as much as I wanted.

“Where are you going?”

“First the Rose Garden, then Kathmandu,” I say, sparing a brief glance at Lek as I leave the condo.

From Soi 8 it’s only a half-mile walk to the Rose Garden on Soi 7; I call my travel agent as I’m walking. I’m also thinking that Frank Charles walked this way himself, probably every day, for there’s nowhere to park a Lexus at the Rose Garden—or did his weight force him to take a cab? By the time I reach the bar I have a ticket to Kathmandu for that afternoon.

It’s ten-thirty in the morning, which is early in this part of Bangkok. There are a couple of girls sitting at the bar, both of them reading Thai newspapers and taking a quiet moment for themselves before getting in the mood for action. A lot of the women here make a point of putting in a full day’s work, arriving at ten and going home at six, whether they have had a successful shift or not. I order a beer and watch the entrance while I’m waiting.

The Chinese-looking girl, who goes straight to the Buddha shrine under the bohdi tree, lights her incense,
wais
, bows, takes a seat at the bar,
and orders a coffee. She is not from Isaan but from Phuket, where her family owns a mini-market. She got bored with filling shelves and working the checkout register and finds prostitution more exciting. The girl behind her, very dark, almost Indian in her features, is from Nong Kai, on the Mekong and next to the border with Laos. She used to be married to an Englishman, who dumped her for another whore six years younger. She nods to me in recognition; when she smiles she reveals her diamond-studded braces. Now here is Sarlee: her whole family, including herself and her two kids, lived off her brother, a fanatically hardworking entrepreneur on a motorbike, until he got killed in an accident. Without any kind of life insurance to claim, the family agreed Sarlee would have to sell her body. Good-natured Sarlee didn’t object; she had been working in a clothing factory wondering why the Buddha had made her beautiful and itching for an excuse to do something more interesting—but prostitution was forbidden until karma and despair beckoned. If her father doesn’t get his heart drugs regularly, he will be unable to work the rice fields, and if that happens not even Sarlee’s body will save the family from hunger.

Now here, striding across the threshold, is a tall, skinny Indian man in his late thirties; I happen to know from eyewitnesses that he is exceptionally well endowed, and only a few of the girls (proud, in turn, of their own prowess) are prepared to repeat the martyrdom-by-member after the first tryst. This does nothing to suppress his bright-eyed, oat-driven eagerness as he looks around the bar for his eleven-o’clock lay. He is followed by a youngish, heavyish Englishman, who is so overpaid in the profession of boilermaker in Essex that he spends three months of the year here, which sojourn is easily recompensed in tax rebates. His vacations begin with modest lechery and end in unrestrained alcohol abuse. I deduce from the signs that he is at the beginning of this one; when he reaches the bar he takes out a copy of the
Daily Mirror
and casts shy glances at the entrance from time to time. Now, finally, comes Pong, then behind her, Nik, Tonni, and O.

I take Pong to a side table, buy her a drink. “That time the
farang
Frank Charles took ten of you back to his condo, do you remember when it was?”

She frowns. “Not sure. It was during Khao Phansa; I remember because my brother is a monk and we always visit him for a day during the rainy season.” Her face brightens. “But you can check with his passport. It
was his birthday, I’ve just remembered. That was his excuse for having ten of us in that tub at the same time.”

“What kind of mood was he in?”