One locks eyes with me for a moment; I experience the kind of devastating insight into the void that makes you wish people with those kinds of problems would wear sunglasses. None of his features move, and he doesn’t bother to shift his gaze. He is in a guard’s uniform, with nightstick and cuffs hanging from his belt. I say something quickly in Thai, to establish that he does not understand. Lek is from Surin province and speaks a dialect of Khmer. I tell him to ask the new guard where the old guards went. The psychopath replies with surprising eagerness, apparently pleased to be speaking his native tongue.
“He says a new security company has been appointed.”
“How many of them are there?”
“About ten.”
As he speaks, I see some of the others. Not all are in uniform, but I’m prepared to bet they all speak Khmer.
“Tell him I’ve come to see Khun Baker, the English teacher.”
I watch carefully but see no reaction to the name. He knows which is Baker’s floor, though, and nods us into the lift, where I have to revise my approach to Baker. By the time we’re out of the lift, another thought occurs to me, accompanied by a sharp intake of breath. I tell Lek to go to Smith’s law offices and check on the guards there. He is to call me back on my cell phone. Lek takes the lift back down to the ground floor while I knock on Baker’s door.
The trouble with inspirational detection: it can make you appear scatty. As Baker opens the door, I forget all about my planned assault on his psyche because a truly extraordinary possibility has occurred to me. I fish out my cell to call Lek again. “When you’ve checked up on Smith’s security guards, go to Tanakan’s bank. See if there’s anything unusual in the security there today.” I have spoken in rapid Thai, so I do not know if Baker has understood or not.
Oddly enough, the moment of random-access intuition has freed up my brain, and now I think I know exactly why Baker was involved in the flick. I’m not angry with him, though-on the contrary, I believe the whole of my approach is tinged with pity.
“Khun Baker,” I say as I step into his apartment, “so sorry to bother you again.” I stop short. What with nattering to Lek and all, I’ve not yet focused on his face. Now I see he is crumbling with terror. I stare at him and fish out a copy of the same photograph I gave to Smith. “I guess you’ve seen this already?” He looks at it, gulps, and stares at me.
“Well,” I say, “if you talk, I’ll see what I can do.”
Instead of replying, he directs my attention to the camera he has mounted on a tripod by the window. It is generously endowed with a huge zoom lens, which I suppose is the point. I go to it to look through the viewer. It is directed at the gate to his compound, where two of the new guards are sitting playing checkers with bottle tops. Even at leisure the impression is of bored souls waiting for a little slaughter to cheer them up.
“They’re ex-KR,” he says hoarsely. “They don’t speak a word of Thai. Is this anything to do with you?”
“No, but I can understand your fear.”
“You’ve got to help me.”
“You’ve got to talk.”
It seems he can hardly master his mind long enough to put a decent confession together. I decide to help.
“The problem, as always in any great criminal endeavor, was how to bind the loyalty of certain minor players who needed to be recruited for specialist services. The stud was easy enough-he owed money to loan sharks all over L.A., he didn’t have a future unless he could get hold of a big piece of money, and anyway he stars in the movie and is therefore incriminated. But what of the technical side? The flick is very well produced by someone who understands movie cameras. It seems as if one lens was fixed to the floor, to enable fuckshots in stand-up mode. There is quite a lot of sophisticated editing too: something well within the range of a gifted amateur, of course, but hardly the sort of expertise you can hire easily in Bangkok, not surreptitiously anyway. On the other hand, no smart operator connected to the proposed victim wants to be in the country at the time the movie is shot, and you after all were her ex-husband, with a criminal record and a known penchant for making skin flicks. What to do? Training, I think. They gave you a couple of ex-KR to train. The thing about them, they will obey all instructions to the letter. You didn’t need for them to be inspired-you merely needed them to produce the base product for you to edit, perhaps while you were in Angkor Wat. I think they sent you the rushes via e-mail. The Khmer had to be trained, though, and you wanted a cut. Was it a percentage or cash?”
A long pause, during which I think he will not speak, then: “Both. It was her idea. She insisted on using me. She wasn’t going to trust anyone else. She’d worked with me before plenty of times. She knew I wasn’t about to screw up.” Looking at me: “And anyway, she was Thai.”
“Superstition?”
“You bet. We’d been mostly lucky in what we did together, Dam-rong and me. Even when we were busted, we managed to turn a profit.”
“Could you identify the men you trained?”
A shrug. “Maybe. They were homicidal puppets, like all the others. You don’t necessarily remember ciphers, even when you work with them for a week.”
“There were rehearsals?”
“With tailor’s dummies, until they got better. Then we used real live actors.”
“In Cambodia?”
“Sure.”
“Were you aware of any of the other players, apart from your ex-wife?”
“No. I was kept sealed off from everyone. I never met the stud, either. I just edited his performance.”
“But what about Tom Smith, the lawyer? He started visiting your apartment after I came to see you.”
“Up to then I thought he was just the John in that other clip with Damrong. I didn’t know he invested in the snuff movie. I wasn’t invited to meetings or anything. I was controlled by Damrong. Obviously, after they killed her, someone else had to deal with me. They were watching you. After you came to question me the first time, Smith needed to debrief me. He’s good. His questions were a lot harder to deal with than yours. I had to persuade him I didn’t sing, or he would have had me wasted.”
“Excuse me,” I say, and fish out the cell, which is vibrating in my pocket.
“Khmer in cars outside Smith’s law offices,” Lek reports. “I’m off to the bank.”
I close the phone and try not to stare at Baker as if he were already dead. “But there must have been arrangements for you to receive your share of the royalties. There must have been some kind of enforcement clause. I can’t imagine Damrong or you going ahead without guarantees.”
Baker stares at me. “But there wasn’t.”
Now it is my turn to stare. “How can anyone believe that? This is a contract of death in which the deceased is supposed to get paid posthumously. No way that girl was going into that without security.”
Baker shrugs. “They gave her more than a million U.S. dollars up front. She told me it would be used by someone for enforcement if necessary. She was very confident-she told me not to worry about the money. She said I could insist on some up-front dough if I wanted it, but there was really no need to worry. When Damrong said that about money, you had to believe she had the whole thing under control.”
I nod. “A million dollars buys a lot of enforcement over here, that’s true. But the main players, the invisible men, were never based here.” I stop and rub my left temple. “But then she was Thai. She would think in personal terms. Symbolic terms too. Magical terms.” I look at Baker and try to imagine how she saw his role. The same image that haunts my nights springs into mind: wild-haired, bent over her breasts, madness in her eyes, a grin of total triumph on her face. In the distance a priestess from the forest period arranges a multiple sacrifice to the gods.