A pause which I think must express wonder at my forensic brilliance, or my advanced toxicity-I’m not sure which I’m most impressed with myself.
“No kidding. Well, nice work, partner. We’ll talk when you’ve slept it off. Maybe in a week or so?”
49
A knock on my flimsy door. Someone calls my name, trying out Sonchai, then Detective Jitpleecheep. I must have fallen asleep fully dressed on my futon. My head is killing me. It takes twenty minutes to emerge crumpled from my cave. Without windows I tend to lose all sense of time, especially when I’ve been pissed out of my brain. I’m traumatized by the bright sunlight. Out in the forecourt just in front of the shop and the motorbike kids I see that the Colonel has sent a car with motorcycle escort. It is the same Lexus as the one in which he recently abducted me, with a different driver at the wheel.
There are four motorbikes this time and the traffic cops have been warned to make way for us. I am surprised to find we are heading for the domestic airport, but there is nothing I can do about that. I wish they wouldn’t be so gung ho with their damned sirens.
I am escorted firmly but politely from the limo to the check-in desk for flights to Chiang Mai, where one of my minders pulls out a first-class ticket in my name. The minders use their police IDs to pass through into the waiting area, where we all sit down. Even when it’s time to board they accompany me as far as the airplane. The flight lasts thirty minutes and there is another limo waiting at the other end. The driver is Vikorn’s usual trusted man. I’m sobering up by the minute, leaving no alcohol buffer between me and my triple-A headache.
I have never been to his house in Chiang Mai and I’m surprised at how far out of town it is. We travel parallel to the Ping River for about ten kilometers until we come to some of the best riverside property in the world. From time to time they appear for sale in the classified pages of the newspapers, these million-dollar mansions in their own leafy grounds with river access and five-car garages. Some of them are renovated teak houses, some are imitations of Thai style, but most of them are imitations of Western luxury houses, perhaps from Malibu or the suburbs of Los Angeles. Gangsters own all of them. The Colonel’s is a two-story with vast sloping roofs in red shingles, white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. Two cops with walkie-talkies stand guard at the electric gate, which opens as we approach.
Vikorn’s driver gets out of the car and walks across the gravel in a relaxed mood, as if returning home after a day’s work. The Colonel in a loose linen shirt, baggy black pants and old leather slippers comes to the door, looks at me waiting in the car and beckons me in. A few minor clues-the way he shuffles, a lazy left eye-tell me he is drunk. Must have been something in the stars last night.
By the time I reach the front door only the driver is there. He leads me through the house to a huge room on the river side which spans the length of the house. The wall is entirely of glass and looks onto an old wooden jetty on a bend in the river on which a couple of fishermen are paddling a small teak boat. It’s like a painting from former times, the dense green of the jungle nodding over the slow-moving loop of brown water, two preindustrial fishermen with their nets and paddles, a serenity so profound it is as if time has stopped.
The room is so big I have to search for him; he is in a leather armchair at one end, smoking a cheroot and looking out. An empty bottle of Mekong whisky sits on a coffee table. I walk silently across the teak floor and take a seat in the armchair opposite his: Italian leather, cigar-colored, as soft as a baby’s skin. The gun on the coffee table between us is an old-style army revolver with a barrel about twelve inches long. The Colonel does not look at me.
“You’re angry with me, Sonchai?”
“You lied.”
“Not really. I told you I’d never met a woman of Fatima’s description. Fatima is not a woman. Not to an old-fashioned man like me, anyway.”
“She was your contact for the yaa baa Bradley was moving?”
He raises his arms. “What could I do? I had to have someone. I had my doubts about employing a farang, but in some ways it made a lot of sense. As a marine at the American embassy he was never under suspicion, but how far can one trust a foreigner? I needed someone to tell me what he was up to, moment to moment. I recruited her at the same time my people agreed to use him.”
I nod in my turn. This much I have understood. “What I don’t understand is why you had Pichai and me follow Bradley in the first place.”
“Because of what you were, the two of you. By that time I was sure she would kill Bradley and I expected the Americans to demand a full investigation. Any other cops might simply have arrested Fatima, but you two devout Buddhists, I knew you would not have the heart to prosecute once you knew what had happened. Naturally, I didn’t want her in jail where she could be interrogated by my enemies. Her crazy thing with the snakes took me completely by surprise, though. I had no idea. I’d like you to believe that. I knew she would kill him, but I didn’t know how.”
“You knew she would kill him? And you used Pichai and me because you were feeling compassionate? I don’t understand.”
He covers his mouth to burp. “I’m getting old, Sonchai. I’m talking to my brother again these days. I sent him a mobile telephone more than six months ago. He almost never switches it on because it would disturb his meditation, but he uses it to call me now and then, when he can get someone to charge the battery at the nearest village. He doesn’t have electricity in that Stone Age monastery of his. He told me I’d be lucky to be reborn in the human form at all, after the kind of life I’ve led. Maybe a deformed beggar was the most I could hope for, but something in the animal kingdom was more likely, or even an insect, a bug of some kind. He’s pretty merciless, as you know.”
“Go on.”
“I asked his advice when I realized what Warren and Bradley had in mind for Fatima.”
“How did you realize that?”
“That tape of Warren the Russian mafia made. They made it because they thought it would be a good idea to blackmail Warren on the basis of his sex with a prostitute. What they ended up with was a recording of a murder. Warren was desperate. He saw his whole life collapsing. He asked his good friend Colonel Suvit to get the tape for him, to deal with the Russians. The urkas have business here, they need us much more than we need them, but Suvit is not exactly a diplomat. You know what he’s like. So then Warren asked me to help for old times’ sake-perhaps the FBI told you about all that? So I was the one to negotiate the return of the tape. Apparently the urkas have their standards, their honor. If they say there’s only one copy, then that is supposed to be reliable. I don’t know, I’ve never dealt with them before, but they do run a lot of prostitutes here, and they move a lot of their heroin through Thailand, so they need to keep us on their side. It was smart of Warren to have us negotiate the return of the tape on his behalf. And the money they received for the tape should have been enough to shut them up. Warren paid three million dollars for it, less our commission. I saw the wire. I got the tape, but I refused to hand it over to Suvit or to Warren. Suvit was furious and so was Warren, but what could they do? I told Suvit: ‘Look, we’ll keep the tape to keep Warren under control. So long as we have it he’ll do as he’s told.’ ” A wave of the hand. “But then I started talking to my brother. He started to dismantle my mind, the way he does. And that tape, you know, what they did, Warren and Bradley, it’s very Western, very cruel, very un-Thai.” A sigh. “We’ve killed a lot of men, you and I, but no women as far as I can remember. And what did it amount to? We simply sent them on to their next lives a little sooner than expected, usually without pain or suffering.”