The Godfather of Kathmandu (3 page)

“D’you know what Vikorn is trying to get me to do?”

The innocence of her expression was compromised by the time she took to assemble it. “No, what,
tilak?” Tilak
means “darling” (literally: “the one who is loved”). She was particularly skilled in its usage for strategic and tactical purposes.

“He wants me to be his consigliere.”

“His
what?”

“It’s like chief negotiator to a
jao paw
—it’s a Sicilian invention. You saw
The Godfather
, with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino?”

“No. Who are they?”

“Actors. That’s what’s so ridiculous. We’re in the field of fiction here.”

Chanya gave one of her beautiful smiles. “Oh, well, if it’s only fiction, why not indulge him?”

I stared at her for a long moment. “He’s got at you, hasn’t he?”

“Tilak
, don’t get paranoid. I haven’t spoken to Colonel Vikorn for over a year, not since that—ah—Songkran party.” Songkran is the old Thai New Year; everyone gets drunk. This one was about par for the course: three near rapes, nine traffic accidents, a couple of serious beatings—I’m talking here about cops and staff at the police station. Chanya loved it.

“Through my mother—Nong spoke to you, didn’t she?”

Chanya puckered her lips a tad.
“Tilak
, when you spoke to Colonel Vikorn about this, when he offered you this new position, did it even occur to you to ask about salary?”

Aghast for the second time that day: “Of course not. I was thinking of my skin, not my bank account. And my—” Suddenly I felt silly saying it, so I let her say it for me.

“Your karma?” She came to sit on the bench next to the outdoor shower, causing Pichai to change sides immediately and nestle up to her bosom, of which he was, in my humble opinion, inordinately fond. Only seven years ago he was a celibate twenty-nine-year-old Buddhist about to enter a monastery: there is no constant in life but change.
“Tilak
, I love you so much, and I love you most for your conscience. You’re the most genuinely devout Buddhist I know. Everyone else just follows the rules. You really think about karma and reincarnation. It’s very admirable.”

“Well, if it’s so admirable, why are you trying to corrupt me?”

I felt a friendly female hand run up and down my back a couple of times, followed by a caress of my thighs and a subtle little tug at my cock—there are many techniques she learned on the Game which have proven useful in married life. “You are a saint, but you mustn’t make the mistake of being a cloister saint.”

“That’s what Nong calls me sometimes.”

“Tilak
, just think of all the good you’ve done by restraining Vikorn over the years. Only last month you got tipsy right here in the yard and boasted about—no, I mean, reluctantly let slip—all the lives you’ve saved merely by whispering words of restraint and compassion into his ear.”

“I always have to make it look like good strategy. I play Condoleezza Rice while Sergeant Ruamsantiah plays Cheney.”

“Exactly,
tilak
, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. What your mother pointed out as well. You’re so smart the way you handle him—the whole citizenry of District Eight has reason to be grateful to you.” Chanya
started to use terms like “citizenry,” and “reluctantly let slip” after she enrolled in a distance-learning course in sociology at one of our online universities.

“But don’t you see, it only works because it’s informal. If I become his consigliere, I’m on the payroll, I can’t threaten to resign every five minutes the way I do now. He’ll have me under his thumb totally.” At this point I used Pleading Eyes, normally a fail-safe tactic. This time, though, she remained unmoved.

“Sweetheart, you’re going to be thirty-seven this year. You’re not the boy genius anymore. You need to consolidate. I think you’ll do marvelously as his—whatsit. You’ll save twice as many lives as you do now. He’ll listen to you more carefully, he’ll have to, how else will he justify …” Her voice faded strategically.

Feeling deflated, my eyes rested on Pichai for a moment, then I caressed his head. I gave a huge sigh. “So, how much did Nong tell you Vikorn told her he would pay me?”

“Actually, your mother negotiated a bit on your behalf. He started at a hundred thousand, but your mum is such a genius negotiator—she used all the arguments you just used, but much more effectively, and she really went on about the extra threat to Pichai and me, what a strain it was going to be on your whole family, the risks to your life. She referred to Pichai—I mean in his last incarnation—a lot, how he got shot in the line of duty and he wasn’t even bent.” She paused here, smiled at the water tank, then slowly turned the beam on me. “She got him up to two and a half.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand baht a month?” I had to give credit where it was due; nobody has ever gotten that kind of money out of Vikorn.

“Your mother is brilliant, and she did it all for us. Just think, we can send Pichai to an international school, he’ll speak English without an accent, he’ll be a famous surgeon just like he wanted to be last time but couldn’t because his family was too poor. And if I have another baby we’ll be able to use international-quality hospitals, not that stupid pediatrician who couldn’t get the milk right so we had to put up with Pichai screaming with colic every night. And we’ll be able to buy a house in a gated community, no more worries about security.”

“You and Nong have already accepted on my behalf, haven’t you?”

She beamed and made eyes. I looked pointedly at Pichai. “It’s okay,
my sister is coming back from the country this afternoon. She’s promised to take care of Pichai for a couple of days. We’ll have the night to ourselves.”

It was sexual coercion of the most despicable kind, of course. Chanya thought so too and was proud of it. After I came for the third time (actually, I didn’t really
want
to come three times, but she was on one of those missions to prove she was as good as she used to be; I was quite sore afterward, but I didn’t say anything), she said with undisguised triumph, “Was that a yes?”

“Honey, I don’t mind risking my life—”

She put a hand over my mouth. “I know you’d die a thousand times and commit a thousand crimes for us, but that’s not what we want of you, Sonchai. Being a consig-ee thing will be safer and better paid. Everyone thinks you’re his consig-ee thing anyway.” An utterly frank look: “Sonchai, since we’ve had Pichai I’ve grown up. In the country there are a thousand ways to be happy, but in the city only one: money. I can’t bear the thought of Pichai turning into some dope dealer, running all over town doing
yaa baa
—like you did with him in his last life. It’s very sick, but for his generation of boys it’s going to be education or drug running. Just as for girls it’s education or prostitution. Globalism and capitalist democracy aren’t going to allow anything in between. What are you doing?”

I was waving my right hand while pinching my thumb and forefinger together. “Waving an invisible white flag.”

As I recall, at this point we all sat back and waited to see how my Colonel would use me in my new capacity: what deeds of derring-do could possibly justify a quarter-million baht a month? It seems that Vikorn had it all worked out.

Or had he? I’ve witnessed so many brilliant strategies of Vikorn’s over the years that I’ve come to understand something of the nature of his genius: improvisation. His plans tend to be pretty general ideas designed to best his archenemy, General Zinna of the Royal Thai Army, which can be adapted to whatever circumstances occur on the ground. I don’t think even Vikorn ever contemplated anything as bizarre as a Tibetan named Tietsin.

It was at least a month since my appointment as consigliere to our cop godfather, and I’d even drawn my first paycheck, which amounted to the equivalent of thirty times what I was earning doing much the same sort of job without the title, when Vikorn’s black-hearted secretary, Police Lieutenant Manny, called me. I was sitting at my desk feeling guilty that I was so much richer, all of a sudden, than all the other straight cops; except there weren’t so many of them, so there was no real justification for the guilt, and I was simultaneously wondering if I’d inherited the
farang
disease of self-recrimination from my long-lost GI dad. But I realized I had to do something to earn my dough, even if it was illegal and bad and likely to land me in the drug traffickers’ hell for a couple hundred years. (A Sisyphic adaptation: you are forever pushing your rock up a hill toward the gigantic syringe at the top; just as you’re about to grab the smack, your strength gives out and you and the rock are at the bottom of the hill again; and that’s only for small-time dealers—I didn’t dare think what happened to heavy traffickers.)

“Get up here, the boss wants you,” Manny said.

I knocked somewhat peremptorily at Vikorn’s door, waited for his “Yeah,” entered, and found him standing at his window with an expression on his face I’d never seen before.
Quizzical
doesn’t quite describe it; he seemed to be suffering from the exquisite dilemma of deciding whether or not to believe in his undeserved good luck. He turned, stared at me, shook his head, and went to his desk without a word. I shrugged and sat opposite him without asking permission. For a long minute I was staring at the picture of His Majesty our beloved King that hung above a poster all about the evils of police corruption (which Vikorn was inexplicably fond of, perhaps because it showcased the source of his wealth and was therefore a comfort in times of stress).

“I’ve just had a call,” he finally said.

“Yes.”

“It’s the weirdest thing I ever heard of. Really the weirdest.” He seemed unable to develop the conversation further for a moment, the weirdness was too overwhelming. Finally he said, “The phone call was from Kath-mandu, in Nepal.”

Now I was starting to get a sense of what he meant. No one would dream of calling Vikorn on a matter of law enforcement, so who the hell from Kathmandu would want to talk to him? “The caller, was it a Thai or a Nepali or a
farang
, a he or a she?”

“None of the above.” He grinned. “It was a Tibetan who claimed to be a kind of lama. You know about this stuff, that’s pretty high up, isn’t it?”

“Spiritually at the top. The Dalai Lama himself often says he can’t match his lamas for technical accomplishment—you know, like living on a teaspoon of rice in a freezing cave for fourteen years while meditating naked in the lotus position and making purple rain. Lamas are those kind of guys.”

“But he could speak some Thai. Not well, in fact pretty badly, but somehow educated. Like he’d learned it all from tapes or something.”

A Tibetan lama who speaks Thai? That still wasn’t half as weird as a Tibetan lama who would want to speak to Vikorn. “What did he say?”

A frown passed over my master’s face, and he shook his head. “He said a lot.” He stared at me. “He knows all about us. He knows what we do. And he knows about the problem I have with General Zinna—our permanent feud. And he made an offer.” He looked up at me. “An offer which, if it’s real, we can’t refuse.”

“What sort of offer?”

“An offer to put Zinna out of business and allow me to clean up not only on the retail side, which we have pretty much under control, but on the supply side too.” Here came the crunch, and he took the moment to check my face. “He offered to solve all of our supply-side problems—all of them, transportation from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Bangkok.”

I shook my head. “So, it’s just someone trying to get a piece of the action while dealing in fantasy. You haven’t been able to solve your supply-side problems for thirty years. How could some religious fanatic in the Himalayas help?”

“I know, I know. So did he. That’s why he’s offering us first choice after demonstrating his credentials and effectiveness. If we say no, he’ll sell his services to Zinna.”

“This doesn’t sound like a spiritual personality.”

“If he was genuinely spiritual, he wouldn’t be of any use to us, would he?” Vikorn scratched the stubble under his chin. “But when I say he knows all about us, I mean it. He knows about you. He mentioned you. He wants you on the team. You are the only reason he is favoring us above Zinna. Buddha knows how he got his information. Anyway, he’s shrewd enough to point out that if we force him to go to Zinna, Zinna will get so rich he’ll be able to wipe us out in five years.”

“How do we know this isn’t some hoax, maybe by the anticorruption squad?”

“By following his instructions, which aren’t too difficult.”

I jerked my chin. “What instructions?”

“You go to the Immigration desks at Suvarnabhum Airport tomorrow at about ten-thirty in the evening. Make yourself known to the officer in charge. Someone will try to pass through Immigration to take a KLM flight to Amsterdam. According to the Tibetan they will be detained. You are to watch and be there, that’s all.” I wait for the revelation. After a minute he reaches into his desk drawer and takes out a piece of paper with a photo on it. “He asked for my private Internet address and sent this.”

Vikorn passed over the paper. On one side was a color photograph of an exceptionally attractive young blond woman in her mid-to late twenties. “He says her name is Rosie McCoy. She’s Australian. A mule who works for Zinna.”

“I don’t understand. What does this prove, even if it’s true?”

“It proves he’s got the guts and the know-how to hurt Zinna—as long
as we accept his offer.” Vikorn stared at me until I lowered my eyes. He had successfully transferred the full emotional force of the words
hurt Zinna;
could there be a better justification?

I took the paper and started to leave. When I reached the door, Vikorn said, “If this is the real deal, we’ll need you to take a trip to Kathmandu.”

We are a hub. Flights to Los Angeles and other American destinations leave early in the morning, flights to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and all points north and south leave every few minutes during the day, and flights to Europe mostly happen late in the evening. So why are there so few toilets in our brand-new airport? The
farang
design team and the Thai approval committee obviously didn’t feel comfortable with too many comfort rooms. I had three iced lemon teas on my way and now I needed to take a leak pretty bad. (Iced lemon tea: full of sugar and polluted ice; in this heat it’s like heroin. Don’t try it, so you’ll never know how good it is.) I took my place in line.