“Well, how about the address?”
A blink: “I was going to show you, but you insisted on coming in here.”
“Good. In a minute you will show me where Mr. Mitch Turner lived. That is the future, Mustafa. Let’s stay in the present. Don’t you like it here?”
He looks around and shrugs. “It’s just a café.”
I cannot penetrate this iron skull. But I was his teacher once, and he loved me with the very same fierceness, the same passion, the same blindness. “Mustafa, let me tell you something: you are brilliant at what you do. It’s really not that easy, even in a small town like this, to have someone followed, to know where they are minute to minute. But your network has been on my tail since I arrived. I didn’t notice myself until I saw one of your people with his cell phone, and even then it was just a hunch on my part.”
“So? My father has to know what is going on at all times. I told you that in Krung Thep. It is his network, not mine. He says-” He breaks off, scared of saying too much.
“What? What does your father say?”
“He says there is nothing more threatening to the modern world than a moderate Muslim. The fanatics hate us because they think we are heretics and cowards, and the West hates us because we have a morality it lost a long time ago-many farang are converting to us, especially in America. I have to protect my father.”
“So you run the network that he put in place?”
“Yes.”
“So you probably know more about Mitch Turner than anyone on earth. At least, the Mitch Turner who lived here in Songai Kolok for however many months.”
“More than eight months.” He catches my eye and allows the faintest trace of a smirk. “Eight months and two weeks.”
“Your people followed him wherever he went, didn’t they?”
“My father told you, we were trying to keep him alive. The only way to do that was to keep an eye on him.”
“Did he know?”
A shake of the head. “He was very stupid.” He looks me in the eye. “No, that is not the word, but he was a typical farang, lost, confused, pulled in a thousand directions like a man consumed by demons. He lived in his head and saw very little of the outside world. I could have had ten men following him in a line, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Of course, being farang he thought he was the only one doing the spying. He deteriorated after the first month. A whore came to see him from Bangkok from time to time. He used drugs. He went through a bad patch, he thought he was undergoing a religious conversion. That’s when he went to see my father. But it was just his Western psychosis. Why do farang think that God loves crazies? Allah loves men of steel.”
“A whore? D’you know who?”
“No. She never stayed long enough for us to find out.”
“You didn’t get a picture?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We didn’t need to. He kept a picture of her in his apartment. If you had not insisted on coming into this café, you could have been looking at it right now.”
Oh Mustafa, I want to say, you haven’t changed at all.
“You searched his apartment regularly?”
“Not regularly.” The question has thrown him a little.
“Mustafa,” I say. He looks me in the eye. “If you want me to conduct a full investigation and produce a convincing report, you will have to tell me everything.”
Reluctantly: “One of our electronics experts from over the border gave us a device, some gadget that recorded the keystrokes of his computer. Naturally, we had to get into the apartment to fix it in place, then again to take it away.”
I can hardly control a smile and find some solace in the grin that is building on Mustafa’s face. He controls himself immediately, however.
I maintain an admiring smile while I speak: “The device recorded the first keystrokes he used whenever he went online, didn’t it? His access code, in other words. That’s why you only needed the device to be in place for a short time. You got into the CIA database?”
“Not at every level. After access, there are many different checks. We never got beyond the gossip.” To my raised eyebrows: “That’s what we called it, because that’s what it basically was. Just a lot of junk, the kind of crap they love to talk about.”
I had decided to wait until morning before trying Turner’s apartment, but absent getting laid, there is really nothing to do in this town, and anyway the setup has begun to intrigue me. I think of my spacious but seedy hotel room and decide to stick with Mustafa.
Mitch Turner’s local address turned out to be just around the corner from where we were sitting. It is a five-story apartment building, very close to the police station. When we enter, the concierge, who lives and works in a small room with a single bed, a television, and a view of the entrance, turns away from Mustafa with a stony look.
“A Buddhist. One of yours,” Mustafa explains.
“You intimidated him to get the key?”
“I didn’t do a thing.” A pause. “Didn’t need to.”
I’m breathless by the time we reach the top floor and sweating in the night heat. Mustafa seems unaffected by the climb. When we enter the apartment, what hits me immediately is the view over the police station, the perimeter of which is dense with young men and women and cacophonous with a thousand cheap stereo systems all blasting out a mixture of Thai and Malaysian pop.
I share a glance with Mustafa, who nods toward the master bedroom. I first see a small stack of books, then: there it is, in a place of honor next to the single bed: a silver-framed picture of Chanya.
She has to be in the States because she’s wearing a padded parka coat and looks just about as cold as a Thai can get in those northern climes. She looks happy enough, however, and that amazing smile of hers shines through. Even though you can see nothing of her figure under that parka, you just know that that is an exceptionally attractive woman staring into the camera lens. Come to think of it, there is something special about that picture. I think it was taken by a man in love.
What a terrific exercise in perception I’m experiencing, like something out of a Buddhist manual. I replay that moment in the bar when Chanya seduced a sullen, dumb, weightlifting, whoremongering moron and substitute a highly intelligent, educated, sensitive man who already knew her and obviously adored her. I’m so damn lonely, he told her. You look beautiful tonight. So why did she kill him? Why did she mutilate him? Why did she skin him? I check Mustafa’s eyes, but they have glazed over. No curiosity here about the farang’s love life. I wonder what Mustafa does with his mind in those moist moments that even fanatics experience. Do they all simply postpone, pending paradise?