Now I was sure he was not human. The swim was impressive enough, but to retain the strength to haul his considerable bulk up the vertical rope quickly and easily for about thirty feet without a pause, even with the help of the knots…that spoke of something else.
“Like something out of a superhero comic,” I muttered to Krom, who gave me a curious look.
When the swimmer popped his head over the embankment I expected the two Americans to embrace to celebrate the athlete’s survival, or at least make high fives, but as soon as Goldman saw that his man was safe on the bank he beckoned him to follow as he returned with long, hurried strides to the first rope that was holding the boat with the Thais on board. I could not help staring at the physical prodigy on the screen who had just swum across our wildest river in a rage. I wondered why he didn’t lie down on the sidewalk, or at least lean against the railings breathing heavily. He simply followed the huge American at a kind of warm-up trot until he joined him at the stanchion to which the line was tied fast.
A sudden squall began to tear the mist into floating filigree. The Satnav machine fired up those pixels as it switched automatically to color. The definition of the Chinese gadget was amazing in its precision: every shade, every facial expression, every detail was better than the best HD I’d seen. There was even a touch of the surreal in its precision, as if we had those people in a box right on the dashboard of the van.
Goldman stood upright and seemed to yell something at his Asset at the same time as handing him some object that looked like a Swiss Army knife from his pants pocket, then clapped his hands. I frowned in disbelief. Inspector Krom played with the controls to zoom in on what he was doing.
What I retain of that moment is the precision with which the swimmer cut the rope. He sawed away while bending over it, like a man who is determined to do a perfect job. He stepped back the instant the rope started to fray of its own accord. The strands unraveled: the rope and the boat were gone.
“We’ll have to get out of here before they see us,” the Inspector muttered. “This isn’t meant to be a demonstration. Now it’s all over, they might start looking around. It’s important they don’t know we’re here.” But she made no effort to move just yet. Instead we watched the huge old American and his young prodigy giving the raging torrent one last glance. “I guess even if they do look this way, all they’re going to see is a wet van.”
The younger man was stunning in his beauty, with a perfect physique, about six two with Hollywood good looks and cropped hair so blond it was almost white. Still soaked in shorts and T-shirt, he didn’t even shiver. When he looked up at the sky for a brief moment I saw eyes of mystic cornflower blue. But he seemed to give off nothing in the way of vibrations or mood, like someone emotionally invisible.
Inspector Krom, her tongue pressing against her front teeth, began to pan across the scene until she found what she wanted and grunted in satisfaction. Now we were looking at a camera team of two huddled on a bridge upstream. Their camera with giant zoom on a tripod was focused like a cannon on the point at which Goldman and his disciple were standing. They were so done up in padded waterproofs that they were bloated spheres; no mistake about it, though, they were both Chinese. What kind of camera could focus in that mist, I wondered. Infrared? Ultraviolet? Laser?
Now Inspector Krom made a sweep of the river where the incident had taken place, then panned inland a bit. I guessed she was looking for Goldman’s transport. And there it was, all of a sudden, so perfectly incongruous that she had to return to it a couple of times: a sky-blue Rolls-Royce, with two men standing together, apparently taking advantage of a break in the weather. One of them was a liveried chauffeur, the other was bulky in a light cream Burberry done up to the neck and a tan fedora pulled over his eyes, long hair held back with a clip. There was no mistaking him. Even if the limousine and the chauffeur had not given him away, the Brahmin posture, and above all that famous ponytail, made it as certain as it was strange.
“Lord Sakagorn?” I muttered. “What the hell…”
“He’s Goldman’s legal counsel. Buddha knows why he would compromise himself like this.” Krom shook her head. She didn’t understand any more than I did.
The weather changed again and visibility dropped to near zero. The Inspector nodded at us. It was time for every cop to leave the scene. The Sergeant and I returned to our own van and Ruamsantiah drove us home. We were silent all the way. I know the Sergeant was plagued by the same thought as me: had some Black Death of the soul stowed away on the ship that brought us Facebook and Twitter?
2
The next morning I’m sitting at my desk in the station reading my usual online newspapers: Thai Rath and the Bangkok Post. Both carry photos of a hired boat smashed up on the riverbank. (Bear with me here, R: when memory excites I revert to the present tense, which is pretty much all we use in Thai. It’s always now, after all. FYI, I’m actually in a cell in the police station writing this narrative while my cigarettes are baking in the canteen’s oven: I’ll explain later.) Ferocious currents carried it downstream at a thirty-mile-an-hour clip before it crashed into a container vessel moored at the port at Klong Toey. Tragically, according to the report, the two women were thrown overboard into the raging torrent when the boat hit an unknown object in the water, while the two men hung on. The drowned female bodies were found a few miles downstream. The two men, it seemed, died in the collision with the ship.
Now Vikorn’s secretary, Manny, calls me: “He wants to see you.”
–
I climbed the stairs, knocked, entered, walked across the room to stand near his desk-and waited. The Old Man was standing at a window looking down on the cooked-food vendors on the street below. He might have been one of Asia’s richest kingpins and a feudal baron of the old kind, but he never forgot he was a son of the common people. The street vendors had been illegal for three decades, but the Colonel defended them against attack from every quarter of the bureaucracy, from Roads and Bridges to Public Health to traffic engineers and urban planners. By special arrangement he had his khao kha moo (stewed pork leg with rice) sent up on a signal from his window. The Isaan vendors would have gladly sent it without charge, or even with a modest bribe of thanks for his support over the years, but he would have none of it. He had Manny pay his khao kha moo bill regularly every week plus ten percent for the delivery.
I had spent more than fifteen years bound in medieval service to this man, he dominated my life and mind, and I was as sensitive to his moods as a timid wife; at least that’s the way it had been until now. Gossips said it was the onset of senility, the way he had seemed to diminish recently. I didn’t buy that. Tyrants like him go raging into the night; the only thing that brings them down is the tyranny of greater tyrants. For the first time in living memory someone or something bigger was winning, and he was losing-that was my analysis anyway.
There were three basic postures he adopted when staring out of this particular window: with cigar (mood climate here ranges from contented to gloating); with hands in pockets (contemplative, confidently waiting the next brilliant, criminal idea to enter his head); and frowning with hands on hips (not a good sign; trouble ahead). To these three mental states, common enough in our species, I must add another, for today he kept turning his face to the sky in the posture of a humble old man begging the gods for help. Here was criminal genius unmasked: ego stripped bare for the sake of survival, all self-love dumped unceremoniously as one might jettison a fur coat to avoid drowning. He knew I was standing near him but allowed a good five minutes to pass before he came back to earth to address me.