“We went through that stage.” Paris, old Truffaut snoring in his gigantic Belle Epoque bedroom under the silk bedspread, None embarrassed in front of me for going with such an old man: You do love me, Sonchai, don’t you? You forgive your mum, darling, don’t you?
“But she never seduced you?”
“Nong? No. Impossible even to imagine.”
“From the age of fifteen I heard the same words over and over: If you ever leave me, I’ll kill myself.”
Light dawns in my skull just as the heat starts to bite, and sweat magically appears all over his brown body. I think: Of course, foolish of me, she would have needed a real lover just to carry on. But he would have had to be a cripple, hobbled. Memory flash: once walking with her on Sukhumvit, hand in hand, insanely happy, I tripped on a manhole cover-a stupidity you commit only when you’re in love. I had to limp for a couple of days. I expected Damrong to despise me, but her reaction was opposite to that. She took care of me, urged me to lean on her shoulder, massaged my ankle in the middle of the busy street, showed love while I was helpless, used kindness from her palette of seduction. “I see.”
“Perhaps you don’t. She did a tour in Switzerland that lasted eighteen months. She was making so much money, she didn’t want to lose her clientele until she felt she’d cleaned up.”
Two beats pass while he brings his heart under control, then: “I was the one who couldn’t stand it. I simply couldn’t. Without her I was less than half alive. I smoked too much yaa baa, started selling it, got caught. She had to rush home to bribe the cops to get me out of jail.”
A terrible choking takes hold of him. He coughs hoarsely and shakes his head. He points to that short, thin white scar on his left wrist, which precisely replicates the one on his sister’s arm. “Childish, third-world melodramatic -but the blood was real. We vowed our lives away to each other. She said she’d never leave me for so long again, I promised to reform, go to some fancy school in Bangkok that she wanted to send me to, learn to speak English -I would be the saved one. When she was totally burned out by her late twenties, I would be able to look after her. Repay the debt: gatdanyu. That’s what this case has always been about, Detective. You could call it a Case of Third-World Debt.”
“But you ordained,” I say.
He rubs his eyes. “She did try to make more regular visits, but then the chance came to work in America, and she was greedy. She used some Mafia connections to get a visa. She was away two years that time. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I was in my early twenties. I’d graduated from university with a degree in sociology, of all things. I don’t think she realized how useless that was going to be.” He looks frankly into my eyes. “I knew I could never work-too fucked up. But I didn’t want to betray her by going back to drugs. I did what any young Thai or Khmer man might do. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But the Thai Sangha wouldn’t have me because of my criminal record, so I crossed the border to Poipet, the Cambodian gangster town where our parents came from. No worries about criminal convictions there. When I e-mailed my decision to her, she didn’t mind at all. She thought I would stay in the robes for a month or so before boredom forced me out. So did I.”
I am staring at him, lost in horror, wonder, and admiration. I say, “Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“You found you were a natural.”
“Everyone said so, from the abbot to my meditation master. A reincarnate for sure, they said. This kid has been around for millennia, flirting with Buddhism, never quite taking the final step. I found vipassana so easy, I was able to meditate for a full two hours after only the first week. After a year I could manage a full day and night. I was experiencing freedom and happiness for the first time in my twenty-four years on earth.”
“While she was in the States.”
“Yes.”
“It was easy to believe that the Buddha had intervened and relieved you of all karma, even gatdanyu.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“But when she came back?”
He turns again to the window. “She’d been busted for prostitution and running a bawdy house in Fort Lauderdale with her American husband. She didn’t give a damn about that, but she was in a rage against American men. According to her, they were either pubescent boys in men’s bodies, or total animals. She despised her husband. Two years with not a single emotional event in the life of a young woman, even a woman like her, was hard to take. She’d spent the last twelve months craving me.”
“She wrote to you?”
“E-mail. In Cambodia the rules are very relaxed. Monks surf the Net all the time -it’s not even frowned on.”
My sharp intake of breath sounds like a hiss in that hot little hut. “You were living two lives.”
He nods. “I couldn’t tell her by e-mail that I was the real thing, a genuine monk. I didn’t have the strength.”
“Then she returned from the U.S.”
“Then she returned,” he agrees, with a grunt not totally devoid of humor. “She was boiling with rage that I did not make myself available.” He coughs. “You know how Cambodia is. She bribed some monks to look the other way, shaved her hair, dressed in white like a looksit, and sneaked into the monastery.” He challenges me with a sudden ironic smile. “Can you imagine? I hadn’t had sex for two years. How erotic, her naked body with her head shaved. Silent and furtive in candlelight. Insane.” A pause. “Of course, after that night she had won no matter what I did. I tried counting how many precepts I had broken: sex, harboring a woman under the same roof, deception of the abbot, habitual reoffending. She came to see me every night for two weeks, until her next tour.”
“A pattern was established?”
“Certainly.”
“You could not adapt-that would have been impossible. You had no choice but to divide yourself in half.”
“Whenever she went back to prostitution, I would meditate for twenty-four hours every third day, until my mind had relinquished her. Vipassana works whatever you use it for.” He flashes me a dark look. “But for a weak monk, even his successes come to haunt him. In the midst of serenity, demons.”
I stand up to go to the little window and look over his shoulder. The three elephants are grouped together, sniffing the ground where Baker’s blood was spilled. When you have been around these animals for a while, you start to notice clues as to their extraordinary intelligence. I have no doubt that some kind of communication is taking place, as if they too are discussing the case. I’ve come to feel awe at those gigantic, know-all craniums, those probing trunks. They seem to comprehend everything. I guess the jungle is getting to me.
“But the biggest scar, surely, was the elephant game itself, when the cops killed your father.”
He shrugs. “Not a scar, exactly. An initiation. I was in my early teens. Until then adults, my sister, had belonged to the realm of the gods. When they first rolled the bamboo ball out, I thought it was a game. I grew up in the fifteen minutes that followed. The real revelation was her joy, her incredible enthusiasm with the camera-she’d bought an expensive Minolta with a big black zoom lens. When I started meditating, that was the first, persistent image I had to deal with: not him dying but her with the camera, filming his death. Her glee, her insane cries of triumph. She was all I had, and she’d taken me into her world, which I assumed to be reality-what else?”
A cough. “It changed her, though.” He challenges me to ask. I nod: Go on. “It was a major success, her first. She started to realize how powerful she could be. After all, in one stroke she’d destroyed the monster that tormented our nights. She wasn’t a victim anymore.” He is shaking now, all pretense of control abandoned: “She was the one who insisted on watching. When she knew what the cops planned, she persuaded them to let us watch. They didn’t really want us there.” I gasp. Nothing to say. It is as if an age passes.