The girls had let me download their videos onto my computer. If I watched the videos closely enough, there might be some clue. So, seated in the vast food court, I looked again.
I noticed that there were faces in the crowd that I could recognize. I knew these people. Was that the lady who sells fried chicken at the corner? That man wearing a striped shirt—he lives on my street. We’ve talked in the café. As happens at a moment like this, my mind ran amok. I went from seeing one or two people that I thought I recognized to where suddenly every single person in those videos looked familiar. I couldn’t place them exactly, but I could swear that I’d seen them all.
Obviously, that was impossible. I decided I must be suffering from an overdose of morning light. Maybe it was the fluorescent glare and the trayclinking crowds that were making me dizzy. Too many photons striking the retina at an early hour. It’s not healthy.
I stumbled out onto the open street, baking under the full blaze of the afternoon sun. Cars crawled sluggishly along clogged avenues, while busy pedestrians veered around me on the crumbling sidewalk. A vendor tried hard to sell me a wooden frog whose serrated back he stroked with a little stick, producing a croaking sound. I’ve seen that frog a hundred times, and it came as such a relief, a return to normalcy, that for a moment I even considered buying it. I was back to Bangkok as I knew it.
But no, something had changed. It had happened while I was watching the videos in the food court. I had the feeling I had become a cell phone recording an incident that had happened or was about to happen, but the color and sound quality were not as good as either a Nokia or a Samsung. The light was too bright, the sounds muffled. Bangkok hustled by, in all its chaos and color, but I was missing a key ingredient. People on the street knew something I didn’t. Maybe Kaew’s killing, although he was a person of no importance, really did have some importance.
It was time to call Evelyn Xu. She’s beautiful, goes to all the parties and is infinitely savvy about the city and full of good gossip. Why didn’t I think of her before? But first I needed to get off the street and sit down. It wasn’t long, of course, before I found a Starbucks, which was perfect because in its bland international chicness, it erased Bangkok for a moment. In here there were no gangs, no mysterious money, no Kaews or Nops. Just tall or grande.
“Evelyn, what do you know about the murder that happened last week on the Skytrain?” I asked. “You mean Kaew?” she replied. I was shocked that she was familiar with the name. How did Evelyn know about it? “Everyone knows about Kaew,” she said dismissively. In that case, did she know the name of the suspect? “Well, you hear stories. But it’s useless to even think about it,” she replied. “Anyway, there’s going to be the most incredible party this weekend. The top ten Japanese fashion brands are doing a joint event, spread over ten penthouses across the city. You really should go.”
“Wait a minute.” There seemed no sense to all this mystification if everyone already knew about Kaew. “Can’t you help me at all?” At this point Evelyn drew a breath and said simply: “Just talk to the people you know. And then you’ll know.”
My heart turned to ice. It was exactly what Nop had told me.
“Even if you don’t want to go round to all the penthouses,” she burbled, “come along with me and we can see the top three.”
“Okay, thanks, Evelyn.”
It was now three in the afternoon. The most dreadful time of day in Bangkok. In other parts of the world, the stroke of midnight would be the witching hour, the moment when ghastly things happen. Here, it’s 3:00 p.m.
Bangkok lore is replete with scary spirits, phii, who haunt the night alleys with disgusting entrails dangling, mouths foaming, tails flailing. But these phii have nothing on the great invisible Spirit of the Afternoon, who descends at 3:00 p.m., lowering her smoggy wings over the city, siphoning away the oxygen and disturbing people’s hearts and minds. A sluggish reptile that needs to bask in the sunlight for a while before she musters the energy to move, she wakes in the morning, but only goes hunting in earnest in the afternoon. Traffic grinds to a halt; clocks slow; business deals flounder; marriages grow stale; the heat reaches its unbearable apex. Taxi drivers talk too much and drive recklessly. People like Kaew die. Not a good time to go out in the sun.
Then I caught sight of Ajarn Jaa sitting in the corner. An influential academic, Jaa is one of those daunting Thai figures that one knows but, despite a welcoming smile, hesitates to become too familiar with. We bump into each other at the press club, and he always has something erudite to say. Jaa dwells in a knowledgeable heaven of his own. But I thought: “Here’s someone I know! Isn’t that what Nop and Evelyn have been telling me? ‘Talk to people you know.’ ”
I grabbed another iced cappuccino and sat down, uninvited, at Jaa’s table. He smiled welcomingly. After what seemed like an hour of pleasantries, I finally broached the question: “Ajarn, do you know anything about the murder that took place last week on the Skytrain of a man named Kaew?” This time I hit the jackpot.
Jaa was brimming with information. Yes, it was drugs, and money, lots of money, some of it counterfeit from North Korea. Jaa even knew about Kaew’s brother Nop, who was in deep as well, so it would be best to avoid him. In fact, Kaew’s whole family is involved in criminal networks. Jaa appeared to have made quite a study of the case. He regaled me with story after story, practically a genealogy of Kaew and his renegade clan from Khon Kaen. As he spoke, the pieces fell together, and I began to see the logic of the thing. Given a background like this, it’s surprising that someone hadn’t got Kaew even earlier. As for the drugs and money—well, in Bangkok that’s hardly news. It was a prosaic case after all.
“It’s been good chatting with you,” Jaa remarked, and granting me the most refined of wais, he whiffed out the Starbucks door and was gone. I stayed behind, delighted at my good fortune in getting some real information, until it hit me: Jaa never had given me the name of the killer.
Jaa had provided motive for a case of crime and vendetta. But after all that factual input, the identity of the man who stabbed Kaew stubbornly refused to reveal itself. The question that I started with in the morning remained unanswered. By this time it was 4:00 p.m., and although the day was still bright and hot, I had no choice but to exit Starbucks and brave the crowded Skytrain home. In Thai the words for “four o’clock” and “five o’clock” are sii mong yen and haa mong yen, “four drumbeats cool” and “five drumbeats cool,” meaning presumably the cool of the afternoon, but it never made sense to me. There’s nothing cool about a Bangkok afternoon, except the icy chill of the Skytrain itself, which makes the heat seem even more oppressive when you exit.
Steeped in thought, I walked down the steps from the Skytrain and then stopped in my tracks, the breath literally sucked from my lungs.
There she was. The lady selling fried chicken. She was a witness, and I’d seen her in the video. Now here was a case of asking someone that I know. I bought some fried chicken and thought about how I could bring this matter up. I’m well aware that directness is never the right way in Thailand, but I had to ask her. As she began chopping up the chicken, I blurted it out: “What did you see at the Skytrain last week?”