“Then I won’t waste your time, Colonel.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t have any party tricks for you. I use my gifts for good, not for personal gain. I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”
The Colonel huffed, fingered his gun, got stiffly to his feet and walked to the door without another word. Captain Pairot shook his head and followed him. The policemen were outside the doorway, putting on their shoes, when Samart called out, “Oh, Pairot. I was sorry to hear about Constable Chalerm. He was a good man.”
Pairot looked back briefly at Samart before both officers disappeared into the thick vegetation that surrounded the cabin, seperating it from the new 7-Eleven next door. It was clear from his expression that he didn’t know what the shaman was talking about. Samart smiled and stretched his aching spine. Cross-legged was never his favourite position. He preferred flat on his back on a mattress. He needed a beer, but he knew the cops would be back sooner or later.
It was sooner.
No more than five minutes had passed before the two officers reappeared in the doorway.
“How did you know?” Colonel Thongfa asked.
“What’s that, Colonel?”
“The shooting.”
“Somebody got shot?”
Captain Pairot stepped into the room.
“It just this minute came over the police radio in the car. Officer Chalerm stopped a pickup truck out on the Lampang road. Couple of witnesses saw the driver pull a gun, shoot him at point blank range and flee the scene.”
“Metallic blue Toyota,” said Samart.
“That’s right.”
“It only happened half an hour ago,” said the Colonel, walking into the room without bothering with his shoes. “You couldn’t possibly...”
“Lucky guess, then,” smiled Samart.
The Archa beer was so cold it sent penguins in icy boots tap dancing over his brain. The mattress was still warm from the sweet smelling skin of Tip, the café singer — his love life, whenever he had money in his purse. And, today, with a five thousand baht advance from the cops, he was flush. A crate of beer. A takeaway papaya salad with sticky rice. An hour with Tip. This was, without question, living.
After today’s little performance, Samart had been put on probation as the psychic consultant for the Northern Police Division. The mind of some fool at the police ministry had obviously been turned by all the clairvoyant crime-solvers on cable and decided the Royal Thai Police Force should openly embrace the supernatural. Regional commanders were given a budget and a month to recruit a prophet. Now Samart was, for the unforeseeable future, officially their man in Chiang Mai.
It had all been achieved without a milligram of ability but with plenty of guile and sleight of hand. For twenty years it had been exactly as the Colonel had said. Loser Samart had scratched a living off people’s gullibility. He had all the potions, knew all the chants. But he could no more contact the beyond than he could thread a live baby python through his nostril and have it come out his mouth. (He’d seen it on TV and had attempted it himself during one drunken episode in his teens. He’d lost a tonsil in the process.) He’d faked every trick since. All the best-paying customers — those who watched where their money went — weren’t taken in by his act. Only the poor, desperate for any grasp of hope, believed in him. He’d been destined to live from hand to mouth for the rest of his worthless life, but then two strokes of good fortune lashed at his lazy buttocks.
His renaissance had begun with a missing girl. Her parents thought she’d been kidnapped, but Samart recognized her from her photo in Thai Rath. In fact she’d run away from Bangkok with her Western lover and was holed up in a single room at 103 Condominium. Samart had been called in to perform an exorcism on a haunted lift, and he’d seen the girl on the roof exercising her Shih Tzu. Teacher Wong did all the map divining and personal object caressing. He made a good show of it, and the sergeant at the Huay Kaew substation was duly impressed when they found the runaway girl exactly where Samart had predicted.
Thence followed his first meeting with Captain Pairot. The officer had come to him as a last resort. Pairot’s unit had raided a Tai Dum heroin plant and netted fifty kilograms of pure white. But during the day the dope had vanished from the police strongroom. The central anti-narcotics commander was flying up that afternoon to appear in photographs and pick up the haul. Sadly for Pairot, there would be nothing to show him. Samart was a gambler. He was one of a large group of reprobates in a conglomerate that bet on cockfights and English Premiership football games. One member of this ring of addicts was called Nimit, a constable at the Chang Pueak station to which Pairot was attached. Nimit was in debt up to his greying temples and wrinkled brow. He had, on one or two occasions, after the odd bottle of rice whisky, intimated that one day — yes, one day soon — he might just help himself to some of the contraband that passed through his station.
Samart took a gamble, as gamblers do. Perhaps this was the occasion upon which Nimit had lost his mind. Samart sat in the empty strongroom, breathed in the essence of the missing heroin and supposedly plucked a map reference from thin air. (He’d looked it up earlier.) It happened to be the home of Nimit, and the investigating officers found the stash buried in a plastic ice chest beneath his chicken coop. Samart was two for two and a minor celebrity in the local police community. He’d been given rewards for both finds, and it was evident that there was serious money to be made from the police if he could just keep his run of luck going. That’s when Colonel Thongfa heard about him.
Samart decided it wouldn’t hurt to give fate a leg up. Fortunately, there were those who knew the affairs of the police before the police themselves heard of them. These were the rescue foundations, sometimes referred to as the body snatchers. Through an impressive network of volunteers, short-wave radios and mobile phones, their members were invariably first at the scene of an accident or disaster, natural or otherwise. They were considered to be charities and were funded by donations, although it wasn’t unknown for the keen young men of the rescue missions to dip into the odd purse or ease the victim’s breathing by removing a gold necklace. It wasn’t unheard of for one foundation to engage in public fist fights with another to be first at the scene.
On that fateful bright March morning when Colonel Thongfa came to call, Samart had been connected to his shortwave radio via an earplug hidden in a large chrysanthemum. He’d been hoping to pick up a traffic accident, a small motorcycle prang with which to impress the officers. But luck had once more perched on his lap. A foundation volunteer had come across the scene of a police killing and was radioing for a rescue truck just as the Colonel and the Captain arrived in the hut. It was perfect timing. Samart’s immediate future was gilded, his next month’s food bill paid. With his belly full and his brain frozen, he lay back on the peach-perfume-scented mattress and let himself drift. And drift.
He was in the front seat of an old brown Austin A40. Until now he’d always been an observer of his nightmares, a voyeur. He could no sooner have participated than a viewer could step inside a TV and become acquainted with the soap stars. But here in the Austin he could smell the old leather of the upholstery. The semi-headed crone was sitting beside him in the driver’s seat. It wasn’t her best side. He was surprised to hear his thoughts come out through the mouth of his passenger-seat-self when he said, “What have I done to deserve you?”
“What?” she replied. Drool dribbled from her sluggy black tongue.