Surely this man was no ordinary soldier? This man was born with an instinct for visual beauty as another of his tribe might be born with a genius for jazz. I wonder how it might have happened, that such a man should ever have dreamed of becoming a soldier? Perhaps his exquisite taste developed later in life, when his career path had already been set, maybe in his late twenties? How irksome to find himself permanently surrounded by the ugly functionality of the military world; might one assume a continual dissatisfaction pressing on consciousness, a vow repeated minute to minute, with increasing urgency as the years passed, that after retirement I will… A meticulously planned retirement, as befits a career soldier, with the foundations in place long in advance of the due date: the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, in a beautiful house, a serious hobby in precious stones with a web page featuring a jade phallus of great elegance. Should we impute an element of narcissism? How could such a man not love himself to some degree, however stern his professional discipline? Even when he was laid out on a gurney in the morgue with the flabbiness of death and his flesh disfigured by snake bites, did I not witness a stupendous example of manhood?
Imagine the moment when Bradley first set eyes on this woman. Instant armlock? A stranglehold this warrior could not escape? The kind of woman lesser men might find too dangerous to touch, who had perhaps been waiting herself for someone larger than life? But where had she been hiding? If she had danced in the bars of Nana or Pat Pong, I surely would have heard of her. Such a woman would be famous throughout the city the moment she began gyrating around one of those stainless steel poles.
I stand up to approach the painting, and admit to an aristocratic note in her pose; she doesn’t look like a woman who would ever dance naked in public. But if she was the bastard child of a black American serviceman, how else would she have earned a living? If her mother was a bar girl her education would have been basic, her technical qualifications zero, her contacts outside of the bar scene very few.
I try to relate her to the rest of the house, which is not difficult. The two seem to go together, as if selected by a fine eye from different brochures. This isn’t a home, not to me, it is an environment, a barricade against the ugliness of the city, a deliberate and very Western attempt to build a separate, personal reality.
A very big part of which is erotic. Who could help envisioning their passionate embrace, like two black tigers mating? I imagine elaborate lovemaking of a kind I have never experienced, a whole evening set aside as if for a private banquet, the prolongation of lust, the postponement of climax, the man’s slow relentless savoring of his prize, the woman’s ecstasy underneath her black god. Sure enough, in the bathroom on a shelf I find a pharmacist’s collection of scents, perfumes and aromatic oils, some local but many imported, bearing the name and address of a shop in San Francisco.
My exhausted body cannot tolerate such stimulation. What of the other side to the marine? I find the computer in a small room which clearly served as an office, a desktop tower with a big nineteen-inch monitor. The office is stark, free of mementos of the woman: bare teak walls and floor, a shelf with a modest collection of books including some very large ones which look like photographic collections, and a single art object in a place of honor alone on a high shelf: a jade horse and rider. I assume an imitation. Who keeps real jade in a wooden house, even a wooden house like this?
I press the power button on the computer tower and the monitor creaks and flickers its way into Windows Millennium Edition. I click on “programs” and find a long list, perhaps as many as thirty or forty different applications. In addition to the word processors in both English and Thai, there are astrology and astronomy, gemology, a tutorial on mathematics, use of English, a Thai translation program, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s New World Dictionary, How to Write a Winning Business Plan-it’s like a self-improvement regime for someone who intended to leap from ignorance to erudition with no gap in between.
It is 12:46 p.m. and my problem has progressed from no data to too much. Proper examination of the computer and Bradley’s web surfing will take days. I call up Word for Windows, type “Welcome, Khun Rosen and Khun Nape,” switch the screen off but leave the computer running.
I return to Kaoshan Road, to have a copy made of the key to the upstairs rooms, buy a cardboard camera with flash and return to take pictures of the portraits of the woman, the jade horseman and the computer. I lock the door, return the original key to the old lady, who squats on the teak floor downstairs, near a window convenient for spitting. She is chewing her betel. She seems to have forgotten about me, for she gives a start when I approach, then replaces the key in her money bag without looking at me. Outside in the street I find a motorcycle taxi.
16
At Dao Phrya Bridge the Mercedes was gone, no doubt taken away by police. I paused for a moment to examine something which must have been under the car. The corpses of two cobras, which had been beaten to death, not shot.
Even as I got off the bike to pay the fare, I had heard a noise from the squatter huts which was only half human. Striding across the wasteland, I became aware of a man’s full-throated roar originating from deep in his chest, like the bellowing of an enraged bull. “Fuck you, fuck the FBI, fuck the FBI’s mother, I AM THIRSTY.”
The headman came to meet me with a worried look as I reached the edge of the settlement. “You’re late. You said noon, it’s one-thirty.”
“I had a busy morning. What’s going on?” They had tied Old Tou upright to a plank with rope which encircled his arms, trunk and legs in a continuous binding of bright orange. Only the old man’s neck and head were free. They had leaned him against one of the sturdier huts. The cords on his neck stood out when he roared.
“You said you wanted him sober. This was the only way.”
“Can’t you give him water?”
“We’ve given him gallons. He’s not thirsty for water.”
“Untie him.”
“Are you kidding? I’m not untying him till we’ve got him drunk again. If he goes on the rampage he’ll destroy the whole settlement. D’you want to interrogate him or not?”
The old man glared at me with bloodshot eyes. “Are you the police bastard they keep telling me about? I’m going to tear your nose off with my teeth.”
“I just want to ask you a few questions.”
“Fuck your questions. I want whisky. Rice whisky.”
I nodded to the headman, who brought a plastic bottle filled to the brim with transparent fluid. “Give him a little, not too much.”
The headman poured a couple of inches into a plastic cup. The old man held his head up like a bird while the headman poured the alcohol down his throat. “More.”
“Just answer some questions, and you can go on killing yourself as fast as you like.”
The old man licked his lips. “When they let me go I’m going to kill you. What fucking questions?”
“Yesterday, you saw the Mercedes arrive with the black farang?”
He spat. “Of course I saw, I was sitting against the wall of the bridge having a drink. I saw everything.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw Khmer Rouge.”
Guffaws from the audience. I sighed. “You were in the Cambodian civil war?”
“Idiot, I wasn’t in any fucking war. A couple of weeks ago someone brought a DVD here about some stupid American journalist in Cambodia who got his friend into trouble-a boring fucking film but I liked the bit where he slits the side of a buffalo with a razor and drinks the blood. I never would have thought of that, those Cambodians are rough trade.”
“So what about Khmer Rouge?”
“In the film the Khmer Rouge all wear red checkered scarves around their stupid heads, that’s what they were wearing yesterday.”