“No. I’m saying the hand that wrote it was human, the mind controlling that hand was not. It was not a real mind. It was a clone of a mind.”
I gape.
“That’s a terrific battle you’ve got on your hands. Try not to win it.”
“Try not to win it?”
“Sure. If you win it you’ll get conceited and start feeling too positive about life, and you’ll come back powerful and successful in the next incarnation and totally fuck up all over again and have to start over as a dog or something. If you must win, make sure it hurts so bad you don’t ever want to go through something like that again.” He shrugs. “But you probably won’t win. This is big. Very big. This is the end of the world, what you have there on that piece of paper.” He scratches his beard. “By the way, what does it say?”
I tell him. He stares at me and shakes his head.
“What?” I say.
“What? You ask what? You’re a detective, you told me. Has anything ever been so obvious?”
I take a deep breath. This guy is a master of trying your patience. Maybe it is his teaching method; at this moment it seems like a serious personality defect. “I am very sorry to be so stupid,” I say with a smile. “Clearly my modest capacity is so far behind yours it is difficult for you to relate to me. Would you graciously explain what the…” I take another breath. “What the hell you are talking about?” I say softly.
He hums tunelessly. Never before has humming filled me with rage. Little by little words emerge from the hum. Finally I realize what he is saying over and over again: “Someone has you on a hook, my friend. Someone has you on a hook.” He smiles. “Congratulations. If you survive this karma, you will be close to enlightenment. I almost envy you.” Then he frowns. “Take a look at this,” he says, using a dramatic gesture to sweep around his unbelievably squalid abode with the leaking roof, the dirt floor, a mean little brazier, one pot, a plastic bottle of water, a bamboo mat for a bed, a crude Buddha image on a high shelf. “You think this is tough? This is easy.” He points to his head. I get the message. He has tranquillity, I have the opposite. When I make to leave he grabs my arm and stares into my eyes. “You smoke weed, don’t you?”
“Ah, a little.”
“No, a lot. But probably not enough. Next time you smoke, get really, really stoned, then meditate on desolation. Concentrate on the most unpleasant death you can think of, then how it will be at the end, when you realize there never was a heaven or a morality and every single little thing you did to make your life and the world better was a total waste of time.”
“Why are you so hung up on desolation?”
“It’s where the treasure is hidden.”
–
So much for my brush with the saint. When I emerge from his shack I am surprised to find the woman from my previous visit outside staring at the river. She looks away when she sees me, as if she understands what I am going through. Maybe he puts everyone through it.
5
After I’d given myself time to think about it, I realized there was a reason why Vikorn might be happy to nail the HiSo lawyer Lord Sakagorn, he of the sky-blue Rolls-Royce and the trademark ponytail. The Colonel was from a dirt-poor subsistence farming family in Isaan and no matter how high he rose he carried with him the smoldering resentment of a people bled white by a snotty Bangkok elite who treated them like subhumans, because that’s what they honestly believe us to be. Vikorn loved skewering representatives of that class, and although he probably had nothing particular against Sakagorn, there could hardly be a more emblematic child of privilege and exploiter of deference to crucify.
“So how do we do it, Chief?” I asked.
“If you bring his lordship in, you have to justify it. He’ll come down on you like a truck, flatten you with the law.” He shook his head. “No, you don’t bring Sakagorn in without a perfect case.”
“Of what?”
The Colonel smiled as he looked down at the street. “He gambles on Colonel Ransorn’s patch. There’s an illegal casino in the car park area of a condominium block-they’ve enlarged the security hut to take over the whole of one floor of the underground car park. Inside it’s very plush, a Monte Carlo-type setup.” Vikorn checked his watch. “He’s there most evenings-starts early, after the courts close. His game is roulette. The main point for you is to take pictures. Do it ostentatiously, not only with phone cameras. Have someone with a big old-style camera with a nice bright flash. Little touches like that have an impact on the HiSo mind.”
“But there must be a lot of security. Someone like Sakagorn isn’t going to use an illegal casino unless it’s totally safe.”
“Correct,” Vikorn said. “But the casino is owned by Colonel Ransorn, who needed quite a lot of help to set it up. I charge only a minimum of interest-but of course, if Ransorn became unhelpful, I would have to charge more-or ask for a return of the loan.” He turned to face me. “Leave it with me. I’ll tell you when the security at the casino has been suspended. Probably tonight, late.”
–
The operation turned out to be simpler than I expected. At exactly eleven p.m. the casino that lies under the thirty stories of the Shambhala Palace condominium building found itself raided by a small contingent of police who behaved as if they belonged to Ransorn’s district but in fact owed their main allegiance to Sergeant Ruamsantiah. Everyone escaped except for the famous, high-flying, brilliant legal counsel Lord Sakagorn. He of the long black shiny hair, the flamboyant lemon waistcoat, the silk bow tie, dinner jacket, and smooth jowls. I sat with him in the back of the car when we returned to District 8. During the ride Sakagorn regained his composure and started throwing out a few forensic hints about how much this was going to cost me, Vikorn, and the police in general, once he got the case off the ground.
“You don’t have a chance of making anything stick. You’re not even the right crew for the district.”
I decided not to cuff Sakagorn when we took him away-after all, he is not the type to make a desperate bid for freedom in the middle of traffic, it would be inelegant. As a result, he was free to gesticulate. His performance was all the more dramatic because somehow in the scuffle he lost his silver hair clip so that his enraged face was now framed by a chaos of long, shiny hair that he smoothed back with histrionic care while he demanded to see Vikorn immediately. This was a matter to be sorted out by money and power-I had neither.
I myself felt the need for a heavy hitter to deal with Sakagorn, so I called the Colonel, who happened to be carousing at one of his clubs. His mood swung from irritation to amusement when I told him about the bust. He especially liked the detail of the lost hair clip. When we arrived at reception they told me the Colonel was waiting in the main conference room, the one with the giant LED screen.
In addition to the thumb drive for the large camera, I had my own phone pictures of Sakagorn at the casino, and also those that Ruamsantiah took. All in all I suppose there were a total of more than a hundred pictures on each of the two smart phones plus the memory card from the SLR camera.
All the time Lord Sakagorn ranted, even citing Aristotle’s The Constitution of the Athenians, while Vikorn said nothing but merely sat at the head of the table playing with the smart phones until he decided to pick one up and plug it into a cable under the giant monitor. Little by little Sakagorn stopped advocating as the photo gallery appeared in outsize pictures on the screen. After a few minutes of experimentation, which he seemed to enjoy, Vikorn found what he was looking for.
She was in her early twenties, owned the pure white skin of northern Chinese genes, held herself with the grace and simplicity of a virgin protected by power and money, turned to smile at Sakagorn now and then with the respect of a loyal daughter for a father figure, and became confused every time the middle-aged barrister rested a hand on her butt. Her dinner gown was midnight-black, her jewelry silver, her experience limited. Part of her wanted to look on the roulette as a child’s game; on the other hand, she would allow Sakagorn to have his way with her sooner or later-perhaps that was why he had made the rather reckless decision to take her to the casino, so that she would be excited, impressed, and perhaps a little drunk when he made his move. Her expression held the question of all young people at a certain point: Is this what I have to do to be an adult? To have arrived in the world? To be a part of it?