“Look!” He is taking her from behind again, but with such trembling in his knees that he is unable to maintain intimacy. Three times in this scene her small, elegant brown hand reaches down to reinsert his member.
“Sonchai, for god’s sake!”
“I bought her that ring,” I sob. I have just remembered. Our affair was so short, there was hardly any time for presents, and I recall how cheap I felt, buying her a silver ring from an antique stall at Wat Po for a few thousand baht, knowing she had slept with billionaires. It strikes me that it might not be a coincidence that this is the only jewelry she is wearing; that at this moment, exactly three minutes twenty-five seconds before her death according to the counter on the DVD player, she is perfectly aware that I would one day be watching this hand of hers, with my ring on it, giving comfort and aid to her executioner.
When he finally takes her to a kind of trestle for her to lean on, so that no detail of the finale will be lost to the camera lens, and fumbles with the orange nylon rope so badly that he drops it and she has to pick it up for him, I grab the remote and switch it off.
Kimberley looks at me with disappointed eyes. “Sonchai – ”
“I can’t.”
“If you don’t, it’ll haunt you for life.”
“I’m Thai. All Thais are haunted for life.”
“Sonchai!”
“Fuck your tough love, Kimberley. It’s destroying the world, haven’t you noticed?”
Suddenly I’m outside her suite, slamming the door. It is a genuine tantrum, complete with amnesia: I have no idea how I got out into the corridor at this moment. I do know that I’m running, though. There is really only one thing to do at a time like this.
I take a cab in the direction of the police station but have the driver stop at Phra Titanaka’s wat. Just outside the massive doors a string of stalls sell candles, lotus wreaths, and monk baskets. I am still shaking when I buy all the paraphernalia you need for a serious exorcism. The baskets these days are no longer wicker or bamboo but the same semi-transparent buckets of lurid hue you would use for washing the car, although these are all saffron-tinted. Inside, ready-packed by the stallholder, I find all a monk needs to survive a day or two in that spiritual desert called maya: a pack of instant coffee, biscuits, Lux brand soap, two cans of 7UP, a box of yaa dum aromatherapy sticks, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and incense. The whole idea of tambun is to store up treasure for chart na: give flowers, you’ll be beautiful; give money, you’ll be rich; give medicine, you’ll be healthy; give candles, you’ll be enlightened. It’s a long wait for the next life, though, when you’re only thirty-five.
The magic is more powerful the more senior you go, so I seek out the abbot and offer him the goodie-crammed bucket, which he accepts with a nod. Now I’m in the temple kneeling before the great golden Buddha on the platform, holding my trembling hands in a high wai and begging for mercy. My mother, Nong, in extremis has been known to promise a thousand boiled eggs and a couple of roasted hogs’ heads, but I am of a different generation: I’ll be a better husband, a perfect father, a better cop, a wiser teacher to Lek, a more devout Buddhist-I’ll do anything, anything at all, just to get this THING off my back.
You never know immediately if it’s going to work or not-it all depends on the unpredictable compassion of the Buddha-but for the moment I’m satisfied I’ve done what I can. I try to meditate for twenty minutes to give more power to my supplication; then, pretty much exhausted, I leave the temple. I’m on my way to the great gates, when a familiar figure catches my eye. Lek is sitting with Damrong’s brother, Phra Titanaka, on a seat under the banyan tree. Lek is careful to keep his head below that of the monk’s, while gazing at him with adoration. Phra Titanaka is speaking slowly, with a beautiful, compassionate smile on his face.
Did you know, farang, that the ancients saw jealousy as a greenish horn-shaped intrusion of the astral body directly into the physical sheath? The cuckold’s horns were independently witnessed all over the world even before the age of saiclass="underline" the Maya, the ancient Egyptians, and the Japanese all knew about them as well as the Elizabethans. I know because I checked the Net. Well, Arbeit macht frei, they say, so I stroll back to the office projecting nonchalance to see if I can push the case a little further along. However, I find conventional forensic analysis unhelpfuclass="underline" there is no evidence to link Smith the suave lawyer and Baker the less-than-suave pornographer either to the snuff movie or to Nok’s murder. Tanakan is only implicated to the extent that both atrocities took place in his very own perfumed garden-a circumstance he could argue away with a thousand-baht note. If, on the other hand, I unlock my bottom drawer and take out the old Burmese wooden phallus which I use only in extremis, like Green Lantern’s light-mostly because it’s embarrassingly large, with the glans painted a lurid crimson-and hang over it an amulet that Lek claims he got from a Khmer moordu of towering seniority-thus producing a kind of altar on my desk underneath the computer monitor-lean back on my chair, close my eyes, and let go of all extraneous thought, what do I find? Three blind mice propelled by tight little spirals of karma that go back many hundreds of years, and a black cat whose pleasure it is to toy with them.
So much for clairvoyance; but the exercise does seem to have provoked a more mundane line of inquiry. I check the data Immigration sent me this morning. It is a curious fact that Baker, Smith, and Tanakan all arrived back in Bangkok from their various destinations overseas on the same day, some twenty-four hours after the end of the period during which forensics says Damrong must have died. Coincidence, or the inevitable response of three blind mice who had no reason to be elsewhere once the cat was dead?
2 THE MASKED MAN
25
The FBI is staring at a tureen of fat snails cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. We are eating at D’s, just off Silom, an open-air restaurant popular with those who work the Pat Pong bars.
“You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “Really. It’s quite a risk you’re taking.”
“I want to. I got into Thai food in the States, right after I met you the first time.”
I cannot comment because I never ate Thai food on my one trip to America. (To Florida; the John was a muscular seventy-something who meant well. I remember massive hands that were always fixing things, long hours while Mum and I stood around watching and applauding on cue at the Bathroom Leak Triumph, the Victory of the Fuse Box, the Battle of Flat Battery, et cetera. But he bored Nong so badly she had to invent a terminal illness for her mother so we could leave after a week. Back in Bangkok I had to deal with his pleading phone calls because Nong couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. I was twelve.) I’m not as worried about the snails as I am about the somtan salad, which also has caught Kimberley’s eye.
“At least have some sticky rice with it. Roll it into a ball like this.”
She watches a little resentfully, having graduated in spice already. She copies me, however, dips her ball into the sauce, and munches merrily with no ill effects. “Delicious.” I see no advantage in pointing out there were no chili fragments at that end of the salad.
“We think he’s in Cambodia,” the FBI says. We are still doing Bright and Cheerful around each other, by the way, careful not to mention Lek.
“Who?”
“Kowlovski, the masked man. His isometric image was recorded entering Phnom Penh airport about a week ago. Meanwhile the LAPD has come up with a whole bunch of background data. It’s like looking at a fly caught in a web. That guy was in deep trouble.” She doesn’t really want to eat any of the snails but feels honor bound to give one a go. “How do you do this?”