“This is it-the real shopwindow, you might say. Professional buyers don’t bother too much with what I have upstairs. I wouldn’t put it there if I didn’t know I could sell it to some fool sooner or later for an inflated price. Down here, though, is where a real connoisseur might find a bargain or two. Beauty is a great mountain, Detective, and fashion only illuminates one face at a time. Sooner or later another side starts to get the attention and, bingo, the hoarder makes his killing. Hoarders are the toughest people to sell to, but also the most fun.” An intense penetration of my brain by those gray eyes. “The greatest pleasure in life is to be understood, is it not? But who in the world does an artist like you or me find to understand us?”
I am about to protest, but decide instead to give the great vaulted cellar my full attention. It is far larger than anything I would have imagined from the shop, and charmingly chaotic. I calculate it must be perhaps half the size of the car parking area, with aisles running longitudinally from front to back.
“The mind cannot take in such treasures,” I say in Thai, the proper language of reverence.
“Let me help,” he says with a smile. I cannot understand why he should be flattered at what pathetic homage a Third World detective can render such a collection, but why would he wish to deceive me? I start when I hear the lift doors shut and the motor hum. He rests a hand on my forearm for a moment to reassure me, but this has the opposite effect. Here in his den I am able to see his strange spirit so much more clearly, experience its agony.
“You understand me, don’t you, Detective?”
“I think so.”
“And what is your answer to my anguish?”
“Possession in great measure requires great sacrifice, if the possession is not to destroy the possessor,” the Buddha makes me reply. Warren grunts and the moment passes as he launches into a kind of sales pitch, beginning with five great stone Buddha heads standing on pallets, clearly stolen from Angkor and bearing tags, which presented themselves to us like prehistoric giants as we turned into one of the aisles.
“Special Agent Jones is bright enough,” Warren says, pausing to light a cigarette, “but she’s an American cop-she doesn’t have your range or depth. I started buying as much stuff from Angkor as I could soon after the civil war started. As an American I felt responsible. The Pentagon bombed the shit out of the country and destabilized it, then the CIA backed the Khmer Rouge because they were the enemies of the Vietcong and we Americans are very sore losers. So, we destroy a country. Well, not quite, these ancient kingdoms don’t really die, they reincarnate. But I wanted to save Khmer art, especially from Angkor, and the only way to do that was to keep buying it until things settled down. I’m sending it all back now, at my own expense.” A sigh. “To be frank, nothing has changed since The Quiet American-when we finally destroy the whole world it will be with the very best of intentions. Meanwhile, as an American who has been deprogrammed by Asia, I’m trying to make amends. You believe me, don’t you?”
“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.