“He was a bachelor. Any love interest you know of?”
“Only a very old rumor that he had a relationship with a particularly exotic local woman. I don’t think anyone here knows if that was true or not, because he never brought her here to introduce her. He always came alone to functions and celebrations.”
“Do you know anything about a hobby or interest he might have had in jade?”
“Jade? No, I don’t know anything about that.” A pause. “I did watch him once, in the locker room after a basketball game. He had the kind of physique you just can’t help but stare at. He’d arrived in uniform but now he put on civilian clothes. It was like watching a metamorphosis. Jewelry he could never wear on parade: earrings, rings for his fingers, a gold Buddha pendant. He put on a bright purple Hawaiian silk shirt that only looks good on black skin. That’s about the most intimate I got with the sergeant. Everybody goes through a transformation when they get out of uniform, but I’ve never seen anything that complete before. He just didn’t look like a career soldier. He even stopped walking like one, as soon as he put on that shirt.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Rosen said, and Nape echoed his words. “Oh, just one last thing, Captain. You did say that Bradley’s posting here was at his own request?”
“That’s right. It’s in his file, which I reread when I heard about what had happened.”
When the captain had gone, everyone looked at me, so I said: “Thank you for allowing me to attend, it has been very useful.”
“Useless you mean,” Jones said. “Did the captain tell us one thing we didn’t know already?”
“That Bradley was pathologically secretive,” Nape said. “And led a double life.”
“Not so unusual in long-term soldiers,” Rosen said. “You tend to hang on to what little privacy the service permits.”
“And that he was a control freak,” Nape added.
“All successful men are control freaks,” Jones said.
“D’you want to correct that to ‘all successful people’?” Nape demanded with a glare.
Jones shrank a little under his gaze. “I guess.”
Rosen jerked his chin at them and grimaced toward me. “So, did you speak to your Colonel, Detective?”
“I made a written request that I be permitted to interview Sylvester Warren on his next visit to Thailand, which is today.”
“And?”
“I think I will not receive an answer until after he has left.”
Rosen opened his hands generously. “Like I said, a well-connected man.”
My stitches are healing nicely, but I allow Jones to accompany me to the gate of the embassy with one arm locked in mine, I suppose for support. The marine behind the glass is an old friend these days and he waves me through the turnstile.
31
The Matichon daily reports that an unusual number of ghouls have been sighted at the notorious junction of Rama VI and Traimit. This is an accident black spot and experts opine that the ghouls are the spirits of the dead who lost their lives in crashes and are now intent on causing still more fatal accidents for the sake of companionship. In death as in life, it seems, my people love to party.
Reluctantly, I pull off my headphones. This is the moment I’ve set myself to visit Pichai’s old room.
It is in the same project as my own, an identical room in an identical building half a mile away. At least, the architecture of the room is identical to mine. Pichai owned a TV which he left on all the time when he was at home, and a very modest stereo system on which he played Thai rock (especially Carabao) and sermons from eminent Buddhist abbots.
A superficial observer might have expected me to be the one who took the decision to ordain, but this is to leave out of account the decisiveness required to step onto the spiritual escalator called the Eightfold Path. True, it was Pichai, not I, who killed that dealer, but that only goes to show he was capable of making a decision. I, on the other hand, find myself to be one of life’s ditherers. Was the Buddha really a transcendent genius who pointed out all that time ago that Nothing was even more inevitable than death and taxes? Or was he a third-century B.C. dropout who could not cope with the rigors of statecraft? His dad the King certainly thought so and refused to talk to him, post enlightenment. Is it my farang blood which fills my mind with such sacrilegious thoughts from time to time? And why should I be thinking this in Pichai’s room? I’ve actually come for his silk short-sleeved shirt and his Fila loafers, which he won’t need anymore, but find that they are gone, along with the TV and the stereo. There is no one to blame; soon after he decided to ordain he stopped locking his room, claiming that anyone desperate enough to steal from him was welcome to whatever they could carry away. Nobody stole anything for months, but after his death I guess his property was seen as fair game. I return sadly to my own room. In my absence someone has slid a piece of toilet tissue under my door. It is gray with grime and folded in a way which makes it difficult to open out. When I do so I find a short phrase in English: Must see you. Fritz. I know it is my duty to destroy the evidence, which I do by dropping it down the hole in the corner of my room.
When Pichai was alive I never felt the smallness of my home, its squalor. Working with farangs has not helped. Even the poorest of them have windows. I wonder if a miracle of modern technology will help me in my hour of need? I take out the Motorola that Rosen gave me and decide to change the ringing tune. I work steadily through the instructions in the manual and find that I have been given a choice of fifteen different tunes which includes the American national anthem but not that of any other country. Star Wars is the only attractive option, but I hesitate to copy Rosen. Angrily I realize that Motorola has led me down a labyrinth of apparent choice leading to a dead end. I have found the perfect paradigm of Western culture, but without Pichai to share it with, who gives a shit anyway? I return the tune to the factory setting, a perfectly acceptable bleep. The exercise has not improved my sense of well-being.
I am still in a maudlin mood and looking at Pichai’s Buddha necklace as I pass it from hand to hand like a fistful of sand when there is a knock on my door. Nobody ever visits me here, so the knock is obviously a message from Pichai, proof that he is looking after me from the other side. I cross the room in one stride and pull back the bolt.
The FBI has reinvented herself. Jones is wearing a T-shirt with the headline SO MANY MEN SO LITTLE TIME screaming from her bosom, denims cut off just a little below her crotch, sandals with Velcro fastenings. She has dyed her hair the color of a carrot and cropped it in some spiky boyish style and is wearing a smile I’ve not seen on her before. Wet-look lipstick. I do not conceal my astonishment.
“Hi. Ah, am I disturbing you? This isn’t a good moment, right?”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“I looked it up on the computer. Look, this obviously isn’t-”