“Saw it when Elijah busted my padlock,” I explain with sloppy pride.
“The cobras were in a steamer trunk? Bradley thought he was doing a standard pickup from the airport? The python was there to bust open the trunk?”
“ ‘Xactly.”
“But what about the whole problem with injecting the snakes with yaa baa?”
“Weren’t injected. Packed in straw between ice. Snakes hibernated. Ice smelted. Snakes woke up thirsty. Drank water from smelted ice. Water had yaa baa in it. Yaa baa drove python crazy. Bust the locks no prob.” I cackle. “Must have been fucking terrifying.”
“What about those two dead snakes you found-the ones that were beaten to death?”
“Squatters had to snatch trunk before we arrived. Some snakes left in back of car. Rest all over Bradley. Killed ones in back with stick or something. Steamer trunks was the way they brought in the yaa baa every few months-that’s why Old Tou had enough to build his hut.”
“Some trusted squatters snatched the trunk out the back door despite the snakes, because it would have blown their whole operation if you’d found it? Yes, I can see that. But that drunk never mentioned anything like that?”
“Maybe he wasn’t so dumb. Maybe they schooled him. Who knows, he’s a drunk.”
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.”