I pass a hand over my face. “I’m sorry, Lek. There’s no way I can pretend to you that I’m strong enough for this case. You’ll have to bear with me. I think you must have seen him while I was away. You were getting on so well.”
Now his mood has changed. He comes over to comfort me. Master, I’m so sorry for you. I would do anything to help.“
“When did you last see him?”
“He came to say goodbye when you were in Cambodia.”
“That’s all?”
“He asked me for your cell phone number. I gave it to him.”
I nod. Somehow it is inevitable that I must turn in the wind, awaiting a young monk’s pleasure. There’s karma here: I’m paying one hell of a price for those ten days of ecstatic misery I spent with Damrong.
Apart from the sudden spat with Lek, I’ve been listless all day. Just to get out of the station, I tell Lek I’m going for a massage, but I don’t really intend to have one. Outside, though, passing the Internet cafe- which has entirely lost its magic now that Damrong’s brother no longer uses it-I decide I may as well have the massage anyway. A wicked impulse of pure self-destruction suggests I should go to the third floor and have the works; that maybe two hours of luscious, aromatic, oily, slippery, seminal, orgasmic self-indulgence might be exactly what I need. I know it won’t help my self-esteem in the longer term, however, and I think of Chanya, even though I know she wouldn’t mind, would even encourage me if it would improve my mood. So I go for my usual two hours on the second floor.
All through the first hour my mind is hopping like a louse on a marble floor, and I hardly notice the massage. I calm down eventually, and I’m able to retrieve just an echo of the peace that once was mine by right. Then the cell phone rings. I left it in the pocket of my pants, which are hanging on a hook above the mattress. Even while the masseuse is pressing her knee into my lower spine, I grab my pants and feverishly fish out the phone.
“I need to talk,” Phra Titanaka says.
The cop in me recognizes a weakness finally, perhaps even an admission. “Talk.”
I beckon to the masseuse to go to something less strenuous- maybe tie my feet in a knot-while I’m talking. In reality it doesn’t matter what she does; my mind is focused on the monk’s slow, deliberate, cool tone.
“They sold her when she was fourteen,” the disembodied voice says into my ear. “It was a family decision. I wasn’t included in the discussion, but Damrong was. She agreed to work in a brothel in Malaysia as indentured labor on condition they look after me properly.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Your sorrow is a teaspoon of sugar in an ocean of bitterness.”
“I’m sorry for that too,” I say.
“It was one of those sixteen-hour-a-day jobs. She had to service twenty customers every twenty-four hours, minimum. The first night, though, they auctioned her virginity to the highest bidder. He was by no means gentle.”
“Oh, Buddha, I’m-”
“Cut it out, or you’ll miss the point. The contract was for twelve months. When she came home, she wasn’t the same at all. Not at all. But she checked on how well they had treated me. She asked me and everyone in the village, and she checked my body, my weight, everything. No one had ever seen her like that before. Totally efficient, totally cold.” A pause. “Of course, they hadn’t treated me very well at all. They’d spent her money on moonshine and yaa baa.” A long pause. “So she made them pay. Can you guess?”
No, I tell him, I cannot possibly guess how a helpless, impoverished, used and abused, uneducated fifteen-year-old girl could punish two hardened criminals.
“She snitched on our father to the cops. She arranged for him to be caught red-handed during one of his burglaries.” I know from his tone that he heard my intake of breath. “It worked better than she could have imagined. The cops were sick of him for his endless crimes. They killed him with the elephant game.” Another pause. “She was ecstatic. I remember the shine in her eyes. Next time she took on a contract of prostitution, in Singapore this time, my mother treated me very well for the whole six months. When she was sober.”
He has closed the phone.
When he next calls, the massage is over and I am in the process of paying the masseuse.
“I forgot to tell you, Detective. There was a written contract- Damrong insisted on it.”
I swallow. “I see.”
“Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell Vikorn.”
He has hung up. I’m thinking, Don’t tell Vikorn-betray my master? I am simultaneously thinking, Yes, screw Vikorn.
A written contract sounds unlikely, but if it exists, I’m prepared to bet Tom Smith drafted it. His masters surely would never have trusted any other lawyer. The possibility of getting hold of it seems remote. Was Damrong allowed to keep a copy? If so, where is it? Why didn’t she give it to her brother for safekeeping?
I’m at home watching Chanya cook when he calls again. I know that Chanya has grown concerned by my state of mind, that she is watching me as I fish the cell phone from my pants, which I already hung up on a hook on the bedroom door because I changed into lightweight shorts. It is almost as if I can experience her heart when my features alter at the sound of his voice: sorrow, fear, sympathy, a touch of anger because I seem to be slipping away from her.
“Can you talk?”
“Yes.”
“Talk about gatdanyu. What do you think of it?”
I scratch my ear. “It’s all we’ve got. There’s no other way to organize Thailand. It’s not perfect, people abuse it, especially mothers, but there’s no other way for us.”
“You’re half farang. You must look at it from a different point of view sometimes.”
“My blood is half farang, but I think like a Thai.”
“You’ve been abroad. You speak perfect English. You even speak French.”
“So?”
“I want to know.”
My tone expresses the beginnings of exasperation. “Know what?”
There’s a long silence. Perhaps he has never formulated this thought before. “What I’m doing.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I think you do. I want to know, from a farang point of view, am I going too far?”
“Too far?”
“The price she’s making me pay-is it too high?”
“What is the price? Did she give you instructions?”
A pause. “Perhaps.”
“And money. She gave you all the money she made out of the contract, didn’t she? How much? A lot, I think-she was very shrewd.
That’s what you don’t want to face, isn’t it? Two weeks ago you were a helpless monk; there was no point in dwelling on the horrors of your childhood; you were penniless; the most you could hope for in this life was to be left to pursue your meditation practice. You were already very advanced, almost an arhat. You were able to dissolve the past because the present offered no way of-“ I stop deliberately in midsentence. I want to know if he’s hooked or not. When he says, ”Go on,“ I’m sure that from now on he will not be able to stop speaking to me.
“Revenge,” I say.
Apparently this word has not yet crystallized on the surface of his mind, like a virus that does not reveal its true nature unless magnified and photographed.
“Revenge? Where would I start?”
“You would probably never start. You were never the one to start anything, were you? It was always her. She knew how to survive, you didn’t. You spent your life as a second-stringer. You still are a second-stringer. Sure, you wouldn’t know where to start when it came to revenge, but she would. Tell me what she is making you do.”
A pause. “No, I’m not going to tell you that. Anyway, I think you have already guessed.”
“She would never have left the strategy to you. I think that nothing has changed. In death as in life she is controlling you.”