Control [disgusted]: You need a vacation, G8. You need a long vacation.
Goldman: You’re cutting me loose? That’s a death sentence, you know that?
The line is cut.
37
So I’m in the canteen at the station grabbing my evening meal, holding the phone to one ear listening to the Colonel while I’m loading up a plastic plate with pad Thai, and at the same time there’s a bleep that tells me that I’ve just received a message, but I don’t know my phone well enough to risk checking the message while the Chief is talking for fear of cutting him off.
“But that’s Satorn,” I’m saying, “that’s not District 8. I have no authority to investigate.”
“I know. But it’s a special address. I’m not saying more over the phone. Inspector Krom is already there. Let’s say you’re both to give specialist counseling without taking over the case.”
So now I’m forgetting the pad Thai and leaving my plastic plate on the counter, rushing through the swing doors and down the steps to the street trying to decide which would be quicker, a cab or a bike, and thinking Satorn is a long way on a bike but there’s so much traffic on Sukhumvit I could be sitting in the cab for an hour so I decide on the bike and stride to the end of the bike line and tell the jockey where to go and he doesn’t want to go that far because it encroaches on other bikers who are known to protect their patch with ferocity and knives so I have to promise to pay him double as danger money and we’re on our way before I remember the message on the phone:
How can one as talented as I ever consent to be a mere soldier or policeman? I felt degraded in front of you the other night. What in heaven’s name were they thinking when they tried to bend me that way? Don’t they know by now how negatively I react to such indignities? I put up with it, then when I can’t stand it anymore…
If you don’t know, Sakagorn’s principal residence is off Soi Langsuan, and Bully Boy Goldman’s is on Soi 24, Sukhumvit, which I think you once visited. I have tried to amuse you with a reference or two to Caravaggio: a brute but a genius for whom I have a soft spot. You will see immediately how well I have channeled his Goliath. For the lawyer, though, how could I not reference that propagandist David? (I do so adore teasing you with clues, it’s such fun.) Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.
A lot of the houses on Sakagorn’s soi are of the old-style wedding-cake type, built by millionaires before the local rich learned to imitate the international rich and built super-modern homes designed by hip international architects. Most, though, are large mansions pretty much in the European high-bourgeois style: complex and elegant roofs, gables, five-car garages, plenty of bedrooms, attached guest cottages de rigueur, CCTV everywhere, guards and electronic gates. No prizes for guessing which is Sakagorn’s; the road outside is already blocked with police vehicles and media rats with video and sound equipment. Black cables thick as anacondas lead to humming vans. A female reporter for one of the local channels is talking into one of the cameras, holding a microphone. When she sees me she tells the viewers the “famous detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep has just arrived,” then she calls out. I smile automatically, shake my head and mime, Not my patch. The cop at the gate presses a button. I squeeze past as soon as the gap is wide enough. The cop presses the button again and the gate closes behind me. What is that weird music?
Inside the house, where the music is even louder, there are a half-dozen police from the local station standing around on the marble floor. They see me and jerk their chins at the double staircase. Then they point to their ears and shake their heads and look at me for answers. I shrug, but now I think I know what that music is. I climb up to the master bedroom. Krom is there in her black boiler suit, hands in her pockets. It looks as though she has finished issuing orders and is stumped for the moment. She nods when she sees me.
“I can’t figure out how to turn off that damned music. There must be hidden cables with an independent power source. We can’t just smash the speakers. Do you know what it is?”
“Yes,” I say, for I’ve remembered. I am no kind of classical music buff, but the memory goes back to Fritz, who was the first of my mother’s customers to become a full-fledged person to me, rather than mere food source. He loved the work of some crazy Renaissance prince called Gesualdo, told a story of a genius who murdered his wife and her lover then shut himself up in his castle where he had his servants whip him for the rest of his life. The off-key music he produced was a direct expression of his spiritual death, his private hell. Is the Asset finally saying something real here?
“It’s composed by an Italian murderer.”
“It’s so creepy.”
I raise my eyes. She jerks her chin toward the bathroom where the forensic team has finished with the video sweep and is now kneeling to take still photos of minute details that might or might not be useful. They’ve left Sakagorn where they found him, naked in the bath. I stare and stare.
The tableau is very famous, so famous I have come across it often in my endless travels through time and space on the Net. Now I realize who David is in this context. I open my smart phone, key in French Revolution, David, Marat, death of, and there they are: the picture on the phone and the still life, so to speak, in the bathroom. I show it to Krom. Her eyes flick from the miniature image of David’s masterpiece to the dead lawyer in the bath over and over again, perhaps as many as a dozen times.
“Amazing,” she murmurs. There is something quite strange in her tone, as if she is admiring a triumph of classified technology. “How he set him up like that…I don’t know. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.” She glances at me. “Murder as art? The final farang decadence?”
She is referring to the way the cadaver has been arranged to perfectly imitate the painting of the revolutionary Marat, with a few differences. For example, instead of a letter, Sakagorn is holding a barrister’s brief in his left hand. Instead of a cloth around his head the perp has wrapped his long hair up into a bun. Instead of an ink pot on a side stool, my half brother has wittily replaced it with an Apple laptop. But, as in the painting, one arm hangs out over the side of the bath, there is a light-colored towel with bloodstains under the armpit and a green towel also draped over the bath, and he is lurched to one side with his head almost resting on his right shoulder, his mouth slightly open and the fatal wound in his upper chest. As in the painting, the body has been dead just long enough to acquire a greenish tinge.
“Let’s go,” I say, and tell her about the Asset’s e-mail and the reference to Bully Boy Goldman.
There is a rear entrance to Sakagorn’s mansion, which we slip out of and hail a cab. I snatch glances of Krom from time to time as we race to Goldman’s apartment. I myself am still sufficiently human to be shocked by the lawyer’s death. I cannot say I liked him much or respected him, but it was not difficult to relate to his all-too-human weaknesses. Krom, though, I can tell, sees only a technical and cultural marvel in his murder and can hardly stop smirking. She has been enhanced, after all, she is no longer one of us. Now I watch carefully as she does that special thing with her mind. Krom closes her eyes and seems to retreat deeply into herself until the world is entirely blocked out. It takes only a few seconds, then, when she opens her eyes again she is a different person. There is a new, steely strength in the atmosphere around her and even a slightly metallic timbre to her voice.
“How many…I mean, how long before the revolution?” I ask.