How on earth could he have known? But of course, he was a witness. He’s mixed up in this very intimately. The look in the eyes of the chicken lady still fresh in my mind, I proceeded with caution.
“The incident?”
“Yes, the killing of that man Kaew. We know you’re interested in that.”
“We?”
“Well, you know, we all saw it. We know what really happened. You never will.”
I glanced down at my watch. It was 5:00 p.m. Like a Zen adept who experiences enlightenment in the instant when his master asks where he had set his shoes, at the words “You never will,” I suddenly saw it. It was so simple.
Khun Jaeng was right.
I would never know. Looking back, this had been clear right at the beginning. An epiphany, it made sense of those Bangkok streets I’d walked through earlier that seemed to have mysteriously changed.
Mundane practicality reasserted itself. What could I tell New York? They wanted facts. With a jolt I realized that Khun Jaeng was still seated in the living room, looking at me expectantly with a glass of iced tea in his hand.
“You’re quite right,” I assured him. And like a murderer who’s keeping a body in the closet but hopes the police won’t open that particular panel, I slowly edged Khun Jaeng to the exit, hoping he would ask no more questions. Thankfully he didn’t. More wais.
Finally I was alone. The phone rang. It was New York. “About the Skytrain murder...” I began, but my editor had no time for that.
“A bomb went off in New Delhi. Who cares about the Bangkok Skytrain?”
“You asked me to look into it.”
“You know we only run that Thai stuff as a sop to people planning trips there. It’s time to focus on serious news. See if you can find a Southeast Asia angle to the India story. Otherwise, never mind. We’ll call you when something comes up.” And she was off the line.
It was six. The setting sun was blowing huge orange and purple balloons across the Bangkok skyline. New York didn’t need the story after all, and what a relief. The Bangkok night was coming on, and the Phii of the Afternoon was visibly losing energy. The snake had struck, was digesting her meal and would soon curl up and go to sleep. Leaving the night open and free.
I knew I would never again speak of Kaew to anybody. Which was fine because, after all, he was a person of no particular importance.
Alex Kerr (born 1952) is an American writer based in Japan and Thailand. He is well known for his book Lost Japan (1994), which describes the changes he witnessed in the country where he has lived on and off for decades since childhood. Alex originally wrote Lost Japan in Japanese, for which he was the first foreigner to be awarded the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan. His later book Dogs and Demons (2002), addresses issues of environmental degradation and loss of native culture in the wake of modernization and Westernization. Since the 1980’s, Alex has made Bangkok his second home, establishing in 2005 the Origin Program to introduce traditional Thai arts to foreign visitors. His most recent work is Bangkok Found (2010), which explores the cultural themes of his Japan writing within the Thai context.
Death of a Legend
Dean Barrett
His dark brown hands working the cleaning rod were large. By Thai standards they were huge. Stubby and rough. But not calloused. And despite their size his finger had no problem slipping inside the trigger guard and working the Smith and Wesson revolver when occasion demanded it. It was what he did for a living. And he was good at what he did.
But what struck you on seeing him for the first time was his overall size. Something about an Asian male of six foot, two inches, with lots of bulk — far more functional muscle than fat — made you either take a second look or look away so as not to draw his attention. But unless he had a contract to eliminate you, you had nothing to worry about. He was the type of hit man who never shot or beat up anyone or even raised his voice without being hired to do so. Using his talent for free would have been anathema to him. And that’s why, despite his nearly unbroken string of victories against better known opponents, he had left the Muay Thai ring forever. Why kick people senseless if there was no money in it? The only thing he still had from those days was a slight scar over his left eye and a damaged elbow that ached during the rainy season. And the tattoo of a scorpion on his broad back.
He was casually dressed in an open shirt, which revealed a thick neck without wrinkles, although he was already well into his late forties. He had served a few years inside Bang Kwang prison for one mistake or another, but those were the days of his youth, and those days were over. Now, when he received a call for his services, he spent days, even weeks, surveying the scene, checking out the person he was to hit — or in his lingo, the poo rap, “receiver.” He never asked what the receiver had done to deserve to be on the receiving end of his talent; that wasn’t his business. His business, as the poo hai, “provider,” was to do the job and leave the scene without being identified, much less caught. And despite increasingly difficult and dangerous assignments, he had never failed.
The living room he was in was on the third floor of a run-down apartment building in a section of Bangkok infested with freelance Thai hookers, elderly, Viagra-fuelled johns and filthy short-time hotels. The room was permeated with the stale smell of some spicy northeastern Thai dish. But he was from a village near Petchaburi, a town known for producing excellent hit men. And even though he had fled the province in his teens, he still favored the unique cuisine his mother could make from the area’s plentiful sugar palm fruits.
A colorful but clichéd painting of a Thai village scene hung on a wall. A village not unlike the one he grew up in — except the painting had left out the poverty, the drunkards, the anger, the petty feuds and the feeling of confinement. And yet even the amateurish rendition of a Thai village made him nostalgic for the way things had been. Before his first hit.
The room’s sofa was worn. Everything was worn, old, second-hand, shabby, used up. A cheap wooden statue of a Buddha in meditation was on a shelf above a cracked oval wall mirror, which reflected the poverty of the room. But there was no dust or dirt; it was just shabby. Someone lived here. Someone who had probably been paid a few thousand baht to make themselves scarce for a few hours.
A thick white bath towel and a clean set of shirt and trousers had been neatly folded and placed on top of an out-of-date television set. A narrow hallway led into the darkness of unseen inner rooms. The venetian blinds on the only window of the room were dust-covered and stained with yellow spots. They were tilted downward, and a few streaks of late-afternoon light spilled out across the table beside his glass of Mekong whiskey.
He paused to take a drink and then again worked the cleaning rod into the weapon, meticulously and without hurry. Steel cleaning rods and small white cotton cleaning patches were spread out neatly on the sports page of a Thai language newspaper. Beside the paper were his gun-cleaning kit and a can of gun conditioner oil. And five bullets. He would occasionally hold the revolver up to the ceiling’s old-fashioned circular fluorescent light and check the barrel or cylinder for any buildup of debris or sign of rust. Regardless of what he saw, he would replace the patch with a clean one, sparingly spotted with oil, and clean again. A friend of his who had been a monk for years had told him that what he was doing wasn’t really cleaning the gun, that for him it had become a meditative experience. The big man had liked the phrase and remembered it.