Pisit: General Zinna, it is a great honor to have you on this show. You must be relieved and exhausted after your ordeal.
Zinna: What ordeal?
Pisit: General, I was referring to the court-martial that cleared your name.
Zinna: Oh, that. I was framed by a certain police colonel, everyone knows that.
Pisit: But General, if this is true, it is dynamite. Any particular reason why this police colonel, whom we shall not name, or indeed any policeman, would desire your downfall?
Zinna: Simple-they’re scared of exposure. Right now the police run Thailand. Look at the news every day, what do we find? We find naked, unadorned reports of police corruption throughout the country at every level of the police force, but not a damned thing is being done about it. Why? Because the government itself is scared of the police. The police have become the only cohesive power in our country. And they call this democracy. That particular police colonel we have already mentioned is always going on about democracy. It’s all just a power play, of course. This is the problem with the West, it is childishly superficial. Create a system that resembles theirs, no matter how defective and corrupt, and they praise you. Create a different system, and they try to undermine you. So what the cops have so cleverly produced is a police state that looks like a democracy. No wonder farang love us. It’s their system exactly.
Pisit: And the police are scared of the army because it is the only viable alternative to them?
Zinna: Certainly. And the only unit powerful enough to expose them and survive.
Pisit: Nothing to do with rivalry over income sources?
Zinna: What are you getting at?
Pisit: General, you just referred to reports of police corruption. I would guess at least fifty percent of those complaints are drug related.
Zinna: Of course. There has to be motivation for cops to run the country. Under the guise of democracy, of course.
Pisit: And if the army ran the country again?
Zinna: That is a very provocative hypothetical.
Pisit: What would you like to do to that certain police colonel who framed you?
Zinna: That is a private matter between him and me.
Lek, of the abbreviated attention span, has tried to follow but lacks the background that makes the interview comprehensible. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”
My mother and I exchange a glance. “The Colonel’s never been the same since his son Ravi died,” Nong says.
No wiser, Lek turns his wide eyes onto me. “The army shot Ravi during the troubles in May ’92,” I explain.
5
The landline rings. It’s the forensic team in quite a tizzy. They want me over there at the hotel where Mitch Turner died right away. I think about taking Lek, but he’s doing his professional duty as he sees it by ingratiating himself with my mother (they’re discussing the finer points of mascara application), so I go on my own.
When I arrive, I see what they mean. In their zeal they turned the corpse over and left it that way. Now they are all staring at me staring at it. I’m not sure whether to vomit or simply scratch my head. I am too stunned to do either. My mind flashes back to Chanya and the way she was this morning: cool and bright, cheerful as a lark. Shaking my head, I lift the receiver on the hotel phone and tell the operator to get me Vikorn at the police station. For once he is actually in his office.
“The forensic boys turned him over.”
“So?”
“He’s been flayed. From shoulders to the top of his backside. The whole of the surface skin is gone. It’s just a bloody mess.”
A long pause, during which I think even Vikorn is stumped. Then: “Tell them to turn him back the way they found him. Have they taken photographs of his back?”
“I think so.”
“Tell them to destroy those.” A click as he hangs up.
While staring at the victim as they turn him over again, I am thinking farang, I’m thinking France, Germany, England, Japan, the United States, G8, I’m thinking decadence. In a single stroke the case has been taken out of Thai psychology, and I’m reduced to whatever cultural insights I acquired overseas. The poor, you see, murder honestly for passion, land, money, or superstition, so this brutal disemboweling/castration appeared at first glance as a common enough expression of rage, fear, or greed well within the grassroots tradition of every third-world country. (The severed penis, frankly, appeared to me as Thai as tom yam soup.) The flaying, though, that gratuitous extra, can only come from a society with a large, wealthy, and bored middle class. (It has ennui written all over it.) So what the hell did happen to Chanya in America?
The next day I spend with Lek on the tedious chore of disposing of the body. Although Vikorn has already primed the clerks at the morgue and arranged for a lightning autopsy for the sake of appearances (he died from loss of blood from an unusually extensive stab wound to the abdomen and stomach and his penis had been severed-surprise, surprise-no mention of the skin missing from his back), there are any number of forms to fill in, people to jolly along, and suspicious glances to deal with, and the guys at the crematorium are a real pain. Somehow they’ve heard that the cremation is not entirely on the level and want a bribe of a value I do not have the authority to grant, so Vikorn has to be reached on his cell phone. I take a certain pleasure in their changes of expression when he’s finished with them, but it is a draining day, and I don’t see Chanya again until early evening, just before I am ready to open the bar. I think her true vocation should have been actress, for I hardly recognize her. It isn’t merely that her hair is short and spiky and mauve, or that she is wearing a different style of makeup; she has succeeded in changing who she is. She wears a long black skirt, a circa 1955 white blouse with lace, and flat-heeled shoes. She is doing the demure Thai schoolmistress type (plus dash of fragmented urban dispossessed), with fantastic attention to detail. When she takes out a pair of unfashionable government-issue spectacles, I shake my head in admiration. She has come to say goodbye. We hold hands for a moment and lock eyes. It does not surprise me that she has the capacity to read my mind.