The Godfather of Kathmandu (29 page)

Now she turns back to what is left of the young woman. The whole of the chest cavity is open, and most of the organs have been removed. A tube is draining the fluids that have washed down the stainless-steel table into the trough below. “So, everything is healthy. Just as I suspected. Now, this is how to hold the buzz saw. Always use both hands or it will run away from you.”

It is similar in size and shape to any small circular DIY saw, though a little more gentrified. It makes a screaming noise that deadens just a tad when it bites into skull bone.

“Ha!” the doctor says when she has removed the scalp. “Just as I thought. A massive subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by a burst brain aneurysm, caused, in all probability, by a serious overdose of methamphetamine. There would have been a predisposing weakness in the cerebral artery, probably congenital. The
yaa baa
would have sent the heart racing like crazy, putting pressure on the aneurysm, causing it to rupture. What a waste! Still, she most probably would have died young anyway—any serious exertion, especially from sport, would likely have caused the aneurysm to burst.” She smiles. “Did you know
autopsy
means ‘see for yourself’?”

“Thanks, Doctor,” I say, and catch the look of happiness on her face: another successful hunt. It’s a beautiful profession if you don’t mind blood. When she has washed she takes me into her office, where we examine her report on Frank Charles on her computer. We’ve just about finished, when I say, “What’s that, on page twenty-one, at the bottom?”

“Diamond fragment,” she reads, and rubs her eyes. “That’s right, I forgot. Apparently a fragment of industrial diamond was found, but we couldn’t be sure where it came from, and anyway it had nothing at all to do with the cause of death.”

“And this, on page three of the toxicologist’s report. Beryllium. What’s that?”

“Don’t know, except that it’s a kind of oil we found under his fingernails. Once again, it had nothing to do with the cause of death, so we didn’t waste time on it.”

It wasn’t heroin
, I’m telling myself in the cab on the way back to the station. I’ve quite forgotten about Frank Charles; I’m thinking about the anonymous dead girl on Supatra’s autopsy table, her internal organs ripped out, her personality defined, so to speak, by her death, whence she derives a certain power over me, even though I had nothing to do with her demise. No doubt she was just a dumb kid who got handed some
yaa baa
and had no reason for not using it. But she was going to die young anyway, so was it really anyone’s fault? Metaphysics aside, I feel awful. And I know exactly what kind of nightmare I’m going to suffer through tonight.

Ever tried calling your Zurich-based Lichtenstein bankers outside office hours? I mean, even half a minute after five p.m. on a Thursday? You can see why they’re strong on clocks. I’m calling the main banking man dealing with the Lichtenstein trust in a small matter of forty million dollars, to tell him to go ahead and courier the documents we talked about when I first spoke to him about my special shipment of Lapsang souchong tea for wholesale to Europe and the need to set up a Lichtenstein trust for that very purpose—a transparent excuse he didn’t blink at—and he’s gone home. Nor will he answer his cell phone, and his assistant’s cosmology is equally clockwork: she’s gone home too. Finally, by going through the switchboard I get a secretary on overtime who knows what documents I’m talking about; she agrees to send them, emphasizing that she is using her own initiative and risking a reprimand and that she is an Ethiopian refugee whose English is not great. That done, there is nothing to do but wait for a couple of days. Without having to rush around town, my mind starts to dig one of those big dangerous black holes.

Why am I doing this?
Why?
My son is dead, I don’t need to worry about college fees ever again, and my partner has left me to go to a monastery.
I don’t need the dough!
But I’m stuck in this filthy continuum. I’m not even particularly afraid of dying.
But I’m stuck in this filthy continuum
. Last night I dreamed of future victims, all of whom looked like the girl on the autopsy table: vivid images of kids with giant hypodermic needles sticking out of their skulls. I’m not made for this line of work, and yet everyone thinks I am, including Vikorn, Zinna, and Tietsin.

Why not concentrate on the Fat
Farang
file, you want to know? Well, apart from wallowing in a dark mood of self-disgust, I’ve decided to let Doctor Moi sweat for a few days. I also need to rethink the whole strategy. So I decide to go to temple.

This time I go to the hyper-sacred Wat Bowonniwet. On my way in the back of a cab I think I’m too tense, too uptight, too scared for a successful meditation. But when I’m on my knees giving the Buddha the high
wai
, I feel Tietsin’s blade wheel start to spin. It is different on each occasion; this time I conceive it as a great Ferris wheel with giant spadelike cutters lumbering toward me. I know not to give in to terror; I know I have to stand my ground. And it turns out that the extreme state of mind induced by the hallucination reveals my true nature: bitter. At bottom with me it is not old-fashioned greed like Vikorn’s, or lust, like Zinna’s—those two vices show at least a
desire
to be happy, however misguided. No, with me it has always been a clinging to bitterness as the last word on reality—like a modern thriller that leaves out all positive emotion and ends up as just a production line of death. But bitterness about what?

The blade wheel cuts a micron deeper with every turn. If I’m honest, the bitterness seems to have been there all along, a kind of reluctance, even at my age, to be fully born into this catastrophe called life. It has been lying there forever, this perverse reluctance, driving everything. Do you know what I mean,
mon semblable, mon frère?

Two days later the documents have arrived from Zurich. Wow! Those banking lawyers really know how to pad! The old boys have to sign four copies with initials on every page, so the whole package—which I send out in neat A4-sized envelopes, plus red stickers with yellow arrows which tell them where to put their monikers—is about the size of a large hardback novel and just as heavy. When I get Lek to take Vikorn’s copies upstairs and then send the other set to his army chum for onward transshipment to General Zinna, he lets his long skinny
katoey
arms sag under the weight. Then I have to nag and cajole both Vikorn and Zinna to actually sign the things; they’re intimidated by the sheer size of the package and all that small print. Worst of all, they don’t like using their ID cards when they go to the notary to sign. Also, Vikorn is nervous. The truth is that he has never dealt in such a large single shipment. Somehow, Tietsin got both old men into a mood of high bravado, and now that it’s
pay-up time, our godfathers are getting twitchy; they’ve never dealt with a Tibetan before. If, by some unforeseeable stroke of misfortune, they lost their forty million, they would both be in serious trouble. Zinna would be wiped out.

Finally, it’s all done, and I send the stuff off to Zurich so they can register the corporation in Lichtenstein. I’m not sure there are any people in Lichtenstein; maybe there’s just a large population of registered offices with a single robot to post letters and send them. Has anyone you know ever been there? You soon get into the did-they-really-land-on-the-moon mind-set, dealing with the virtual world of high finance. Then, out of the blue, a package addressed to me arrives at my home. It seems to have been sent by ordinary airmail from somewhere in Hawaii. I think: Hawaii? But the package makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Why is that? Oh, only because the bubblepak envelope is one of those designed exclusively for the shipment of DVDs. I am strangely reluctant to open it. I even leave it lying on the teak coffee table that Chanya and I bought at Chatuchak market on one of our lighthearted shopping sprees about a thousand years ago when the world was still innocent.

When I get to work, I tell myself I’m being quite girlishly silly, and after ten minutes staring at my computer monitor and consulting the online I-Ching and the Yahoo! astrology page, both of which are wildly enthusiastic about my love prospects today, I sigh and take a cab back home. When I pick the package up from the coffee table, I experience the same sensation as before: hairs standing to paranoid attention, something crawling up my back, a distinct premonition of death. Whose? Okay, okay, I’m opening it. Now I have it, an unmarked disk, shining brilliantly on one side; it is a Sony DVD, charcoal black on the reverse side with no title. I blow out my cheeks and scratch my ear before sliding it into my DVD player. At first I think it must be some kind of joke, for nothing appears on the screen. When I check the numbers flicking by on the counter, however, I see it must be a full-length movie of some kind. Finally, the monitor flickers into life—and there he is.

The Frank Charles standing before the camera is not quite as overweight as his cadaver. I think he must have filmed the introduction to his movie at least a year before he died. He appears to be looking directly at me when he says, “Hi, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep—unless something has gone badly wrong, you are the one watching this movie, and, from what I know of you, you are probably alone.

“I guess you never expected to hear from me, huh? I am assuming you are the one running the investigation into my murder, because you always get the
farang
murders in District Eight. But even if I’m wrong, you have certainly heard of me and my spectacular manner of death. You are aware of the existence of a film. If you found the DVD in my safe, you also discovered it was just a set of preliminary shots of Nepal: not what you were looking for at all. You and your colleagues have also failed to discover whodunit. That will all be explained in the next two hours. What you need to know right now, though, is: why you?”

What is interesting to me right now is that the camera follows Frank Charles as he paces a little with his jaw in his hand; he is not alone, therefore, although you would never know it from his posture of total self-absorption. He carries his weight well, as a big man can, and does not thrust his gut forward in arrogance; one gets some sense of what it must have been like to have lived in the skin of that big, male, energetic, once-superb American animal. From his body language one understands that, before something went badly wrong, the world had belonged to him. Now
he thrusts his hands into the pockets of his oversized denim overalls; there is a microphone attached to one of the straps.

“It’s ironic, because there is someone else who thinks she’s the muse behind this work. Let’s say she’s mistaken. She’s not the muse. She’s what you might call a point producer—the one who makes sure certain vital props are at hand. No, I needed someone with your eye, Detective, the one I could not fool, even when I tried my damnedest.”

He pauses and makes an almost comic gesture of humility and defeat. “I swear to God, Detective, that as far as I know there are only two people in the world who didn’t think much of my first full-length movie. You and me. You saw the plagiarism—so did I. And in your review you had no mercy. The little scene I stole from Truffaut, those long interior shots that Bertolucci perfected, playing with color à la Robert Altman, outdoor shots from John Ford, suspense from Hitchcock—and a lot of other thefts, too: you saw it all. You must have had one hell of a teacher at film school. Except you never went to film school, did you? That’s another thing about you that told me you are the one: your permanent pariah status in your society. Not only are you a
leuk kreung
, a half-caste, but your mother’s illustrious lovers taught you way above your station. One of them must have been an old-style French-movie buff, a real
Cahiers du Cinéma
type. Whatever. I’ll never know what you will say about what you are about to see. That’s not important. What’s important is that you understand.”

He lets a few beats pass. “You know what’s tough about being a voice from the dead? Jealousy. If you are investigating the case, Detective, have you gone up to Nepal yet? Have you met Tara? Have you slept with her? Or is this all just gibberish to you? I’ll never know. But what I do know is that you’re a Buddhist, and quite a serious one. That also weighed on my decision to show you my beloved masterpiece. You see, my other muse is too much of a cynic; she will see the point but not the pain. You, though, with that uncanny intelligence and sensitivity everyone says you have—you are ideal. I bet you experience my movie just as if it were all happening to you.”

He takes his hands out of his pockets and holds them behind his back.

“But the kind of Buddhism I almost got into doesn’t bear much resemblance to yours.
Vajra
, the Tibetans call it. Thunderbolt Buddhism, usually translated as Apocalyptic or Tantric Buddhism. It’s pretty heavy stuff, and that mantra Tara gave me really did my head in.” He pauses. “But at
the end of the day, you know, a man like me isn’t going to be satisfied with mantras and mandalas; I’m just not that cerebral. And anyway, I belong to the great Western tradition of dramatic expression—and there’s no drama in Buddhism, as far as I can see. No, this is how it happened to me.”

He seems to falter, like a man shifting gears in his mind and fumbling a little—those might be tears in his eyes, it’s hard to tell.

“I was up in Nepal one time, looking for Tara, who had turned invisible on me yet again, and I was that far gone in the disease we call love that I thought maybe if I meditated and spent time at Bodnath and generally turned myself into a Tibetan—maybe she would come back to me. And that, my friend, is no state of mind in which to meditate or make a movie. So I gave up, like a good spoiled Yank, and just wandered around Kathmandu for a while. It happened to be a holy day, that one in October when they make a lot of animal sacrifices. I stood in a crowd of Hindus and watched while the Brahmin priest slaughtered a goat by clamping its head in a stock and cutting it off with a big knife. Then he threw some of the meat on the fire in the center of the shrine. And it was all Technicolor, of course, the great orange flames, the huge vertical crimson
tikka
in the middle of the priest’s forehead, his fantastic robes, the chants, the incense. Then when I looked around, I saw the whole square had been converted into a giant slaughterhouse, wherever I looked I saw shrines, priests, smoke, and goats—and for one dizzying moment I realized that most bourgeois of words,
surreal
, was not going to cut it; the squeals of the goats did not permit such an escape route.”