“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?”
Through the oily steam billowing from her woks, I saw something in her eyes. Nop had been noncommittal. Evelyn had focused on her parties. The girls in red and green had seen the whole incident as a photo op. Ajarn Jaa had been caught up in the complexity of his theories. But this woman was afraid. In her eyes I saw a deep and implacable fear. “I wasn’t there,” she stammered. As she handed me a little plastic bag of chicken and rice, she whispered, “You’d better go home.”
There was clearly no point in pressing further. I thought: “I’d better take her words at face value. It’s time to go home.” In any case it was almost five o’clock, and soon New York would be on the phone demanding a response.
As I entered my building, I recognized someone seated in the lobby. It was the man in the striped shirt. He reintroduced himself as Khun Jaeng, a Thai banker. His condo was a few hundred meters down the soi. Could he come up to my apartment to talk?
He looked so proper, I felt it would be rude to refuse. You never know what trouble an act of rudeness could later cause you. So I invited him up.
We sat down in the living room, the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows and beaming through glasses of iced tea on the glass table between us. Pleasantries were exchanged. “I see you sometimes at the café, and since I live on the same soi, it’s a pity we haven’t had a chance to meet properly,” Khun Jaeng opened.
It was hard to focus on the conversation. Why was this person in my home? The light shining from behind Jaeng’s chair fell straight into my eyes, dazzling, disorienting. I had a report to file soon with very little real information to offer, and in New York they would not be amused.
Into my head flashed a scene from the old French novel Thaîs. A hermit has been meditating for decades in a desert hut, and every evening six black jackals come and sit outside. One night he has an unsettling dream, and when he awakes the next morning, he finds one little jackal sitting inside his tent. He knows then that outside forces have penetrated his magic ring.
The Phii of the Afternoon had breached my defenses. She had forced herself in and was shining light into a space usually shadowed.
The Phii of the Night drape themselves in outlandish costumes and go out and do a little hooting and grimacing, which scares the good people of the city as they walk dark byways. But after a few hours of haunting, these phii retire and you rarely see them again. The Phii of the Afternoon, on the other hand, once she’s entered your home, never goes away. I realized with finality that she would be waiting for me when I arose the next day. And the day after.
I wrenched myself back to Khun Jaeng, who was rambling on about our soi, the traffic, the breakfast menu at the café. Then finally: “I hear you’re investigating the incident on the Skytrain last week,” he remarked.