“Yes.”
“See, that’s the difference. Jones wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t want to believe I can be a good guy. American cops have zero tolerance for moral ambiguity, otherwise they couldn’t be American cops, could they? Not that I give a goddamn.”
Step by step he takes me down the long corridor chockablock with gold Buddhas, spirit houses, ceramics, wood carvings from Ayutthaya, thirty feet of shelving from floor to ceiling dedicated to alms bowls, another section bearing hundreds of ceramic figurines-it is all amazing, priceless, wonderful. And I am still carrying the white tiger.
When we reach the end of the aisle, Warren takes it from me and sets it on a shelf. “It is the best thing I have. The phrase ‘worth its weight in gold’ is a cliché which really needs revision. I wouldn’t sell it for ten times its weight in gold. Now explain to me, Detective, how I knew it was perfectly safe in your hands?”
I shrug modestly, then search his eyes when I hear the lift doors open at the distant end of the warehouse. Footsteps, and Fatima appears with the two Khmer. Now both are toting Uzis and Fatima looks haggard. Warren gives her a cruel, agonized glance as she approaches.
“Because you do me the honor of recognizing my integrity, so I repay the compliment.” He is clearly distracted as he utters these words and beckons Fatima to approach. The two Khmer stiffen and remain where they are. Now I see it. Somehow he picked it up when my attention was distracted: a rawhide handle and yards of leather disappearing into the gloom under a shelf.
When Fatima reaches us he turns her to face the wall and places her hands gently on a shelf about two feet above her head.
I say: “Please don’t.”
Ignoring me, he reaches around her to undo the buttons of her blouse, which he then pulls up to tuck over her shoulders, revealing the length of her perfect back and her bra strap. He undoes the strap; now there is no impediment to the eye traveling up and down those miraculous vertebrae. “Please don’t.”
Taking my hand, he brushes it up and down her back, then makes me reach round to cup a breast. “To learn love, all a man need do is touch her perfect flesh, no? But to keep loving, that’s a very different skill. Which of us isn’t seeking that love which is as yielding as Fatima’s flesh, and as resilient as stone? Which of us doesn’t test love till it breaks? Am I really so weird?”
His face is quite twisted in agony now. It does not require clairvoyance to see his demon in all its black glory. I whisper hoarsely: “Whip me instead.”
A leer from Warren. “Don’t disappoint me, Detective. You know it’s not as easy as that.” He hands me the whip.
“No.”
“But you’ll be so much gentler than I. If you do it I promise not to lay a finger on her.”
“No.”
“Not for your life?”
“I don’t care about my life.”
A long silence during which I think the Khmer are about to execute me, then: “Okay, you win.” I feel these last words are intended for Fatima. I glimpse Fatima’s hands doing up her bra strap. Her shirt is still undone when she turns to take the whip from him. With a leer of extraordinary cruelty, she tells him: “I told you he’s an arhat. You lose. Pick up the tiger and put it on your head.”
I watch while Warren does as he is told. He is trembling with the priceless artifact balancing on the top of his head while she takes ten paces toward the back of the shop. I am thinking that perhaps she does not have a lot of practice when she snaps the whip to make it snake out behind her. There is a crash from the alms bowls section of the warehouse, which makes me search Warren’s face. He is literally chewing his lips. Suddenly the rawhide is whistling toward us and I instinctively duck as it passes overhead. I don’t think Fatima has made any attempt at accuracy, the leather comes crashing down toward Warren’s face, forcing him to grab the tiger while he hunches over. The leather tears out a great swath of his jacket and sweater and the shirt underneath, and tears his flesh. Still, he does not let go of the tiger.
“You cheated,” Fatima hisses. “Who told you to move?” The whip comes crashing down again, this time on the hands holding the tiger. Still he does not let go, but the leather curls around the plate and she pulls it out of his hands. It smashes to the floor in a thousand pieces. I am standing with my jaw hanging open, my eyes jerking from her to Warren to the fragments on the floor. “He cheated,” she hisses at me. “You saw it?” Warren and I both duck as she whirls the whip over her head, then swings it toward us. She hits the shelf full of ceramic figurines, clearing it in a stroke. Warren is hunched, sobbing. He goes down on all fours to try to pick up the smashed plate and mutilated human figures on the floor.
I am given no time to make sense of this bizarre event. The Khmer are beside me shepherding me back to the lift, leaving Fatima and Warren in the warehouse. I am marched out of the shop into the muggy Sunday by the river, where tourists browse and droop and the longtail boats roar up and down. Jones is in the back of her hired car in the open-air car park and does not disguise her relief when she sees me.
48
We drove around aimlessly, Jones and I, while we tried to make sense of my adventure in Warren’s shop. We thrashed it around in a hundred traffic jams, drove to Pattaya, lunched at a fish restaurant by the sea where Jones punished me for not sleeping with her by getting into a rant against Thai cuisine (chili in the fish: How can you ever taste anything properly with your whole frigging mouth on fire?), and returned to Bangkok with no explanation of the puzzle beyond a perceptive remark from the FBI: “One thing’s for sure, somehow Fatima got hold of that tape Iamskoy was talking about. Take it from an American, no way Warren puts up with that kind of shit if she hasn’t got the means to ruin his life.”
“And the Khmer, his bodyguards?”
“Over to you, you’re our tame Asian.”
Night has already fallen as I close the car door on Jones and stroll across the forecourt. The common parts are poorly lit, only the illegal shop with the illegal tarpaulin is bright with lamps which illuminate the motorcycle chauffeurs who are still lolling in their beds and look stoned out of their minds. I climb the steps to my room and see that someone has busted the padlock. Burglars do not normally flatter me with their attentions, because everyone knows I have nothing, even though I’m a cop. It has happened only once before, when a neighbor’s TV packed up in the middle of a soap and he broke into my room in the absolute, but false, certainty that I would have a television of my own. Standing in front of the busted lock, I wonder if someone else’s TV has broken down, or should I be worrying about something more sinister? I decide that my enemies are too sophisticated to bust the lock and wait inside my room to assassinate me in my own home, but I lack the nerve to act on this comfortable conclusion until I hear a prolonged trombone fart from inside. I open the door cautiously. I cannot see him but an animal sense makes me aware of his vast bulk and I can hear his gigantic breathing. He grunts and rubs his eyes as I turn on the light. Torn cardboard six-packs are strewn around the futon, which is far too narrow for him even though he has dragged it into the center of the room. He overflows on either side, but manages to push himself up into a sitting position with some agility.