I insert the pinkie of my left hand into my left ear, which is still itching from the motorbike ride, and work the wax around a bit. “Really? Forgive me, Khun Sukum, but is there not a failure of logic in what you have just said? How would one know until the end of the case if the perp were Thai or farang?”
“I knew you were going to say that,” he snaps. “Look, this is obviously a Thai hit.” I ostentatiously move my eyes up and down the gash from the victim’s solar plexus almost to the pubic area; the corpse is so massive it is hard to imagine a little Thai girl standing on tippy-toe so she can get a good angle with the boning knife. I allow Sukum a skeptical stare. “Okay, it’s a bit ambitious for a girl, but you know how they go when they get angry. Maybe he insisted on buggering her and she got mad-our girls can be picky these days.”
“But didn’t I hear someone say that he’s famous?”
“You mean it’s a paid hit? Maybe, but if it’s a hit, it’s bound to be by a Thai. In Thailand ninety-nine point nine percent of professional hits are by Thais,” he says patriotically.
“Is that an official statistic? Perhaps you are right, Khun Sukum. Mind if I look around?”
Mostly I’m staring at the dead American. His hair is long and gray and swept back in a ponytail; a gray beard expands an already gigantic face. His mouth is half open, and a little blood is trickling from one corner. When I shift my glance to the rest of the apartment, I immediately become mesmerized by the books. It occurs to me that Sukum has no English.
I take a couple of surreptitious steps in the direction of the bookshelves, which are thinly populated with a set of novels and screenplays. My eyes fixate insanely when I come to a collection of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. I turn my back so Sukum cannot see the intensely puzzled frown on my face, which only increases when I check the other titles. I finally manage to tear my eyes away, and pace the room for a moment. I am careful not to take any more notice of the bookshelves. For a moment my eyes rest on the cheap cathode-ray TV on a stand with a DVD player hooked up to it on a lower shelf.
“Khun Sukum,” I say, my hands clasped gently behind my back as I pace, “would you do me the honor of indulging a whim of mine? Would you open the victim’s mouth and tell me if you see there either a small pebble or an imago, or possibly both?”
Suspicious, Sukum opens the giant’s mouth and slips in his fingers, then pulls out a large black imago and a pebble. He is staring at me with fear, loathing, and envy-driven hatred. “How in Buddha’s name did you-”
“And I think, Khun Sukum, you had better examine the top of the victim’s skull, in the area of the fontanel; you might want to pull at the hair in that area, give it a good tug, that’s right.”
As he does so, a large circular section of the skull, which amounts to the whole of the top of the head, comes away with the hair. Now we have a clear view of the victim’s brain, still bright red under the protective membrane, but with a few folds missing from the left lobe.
When Sukum stares wildly at me, I allow my eyes to divert to a small and squalid coffee table on which a paper plate and a plastic spoon have been left. Now Sukum is shuddering involuntarily, Lek is astounded at my brilliance, and everyone is staring at me. I shrug. Sukum shakily replaces the victim’s scalp, carefully trying to fit it into place like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that might get damaged if he forces it, then looks up at me. “I don’t know how you did that; it must be your farang blood.” I feel bad for him as I watch his ambition sag, his identity crumple. Finally, with weary detachment after a heroic inner struggle: “Okay, it’s your case, obviously the assassin was a farang, we don’t have any Thai murderers that crazy.”
I shake my head and tut. “No, no, my dear Khun Sukum, I would not dream of standing between you and your life’s ambition of becoming a detective sergeant. Wouldn’t dream of it, my dear chap. Look, why don’t you simply use me as a resource-here’s my private cell phone number, call me whenever you get stuck, hey?”
Lek is pulling at my sleeve; he has something private and confidential to communicate. “Look, I’ve got to go now, let’s meet for a brainstorming session sometime soon. It’s okay, your name will be on the file, I don’t want any credit, just the honor of helping out in a spectacular case.” I smile as Lek pulls me out of the room. At the door I add, “I know you’ve thought of it already, Detective Sukum, but just in case it has inexplicably escaped your notice, the victim was not staying here. No clothes or other signs of habitation, you see, only a few books. I would check with all the five-star hotels hereabout, if I were you.” Sukum knows so little about farang, he still doesn’t get it. “He was probably hiring the room for sex, while living in some five-star suite at the Dusit Thani or something.” Sukum nods, trying to get his head around the idea that someone might rent two hotel rooms at the same time, just to be discreet. Now that really does say ruey ruey in Thai: fabulously rich.
In the lift on the way back to the ground floor, a silent trickle of tears flows down Lek’s cheeks.
2
Lek has me trapped at a cooked-food stall on the sidewalk off Soi 11. It’s lunchtime by now, and all the tables are full. There is a traffic jam to my left and iron railings to my right. Lek sits opposite, staring resentfully. “I can’t believe what you just did,” he says. We have ordered and the food has arrived-tom yam gung for Lek, green sweet rabbit curry for me; neither of us can eat.
“I told you, I’ve found the path, you should be pleased.”
“For five years you’ve been the guy who has to get promoted next. It’s outrageous that the committee hasn’t promoted you yet. If it was up to Colonel Vikorn, you would have been promoted years ago. Even your enemies think you should get promoted. Sukum’s okay, but he’s not inspired. You’re a genius.”
“They’ll never promote me. You know that. People put up with me as a lowly detective. If I rise any higher, people will start talking about my farang blood. You know how Thais are. Totally fair-minded Buddhists, until their personal income is threatened. Anyway, I told you, I’m almost there, Lek. A few more sessions with Tietsin and I’ll be an awakened being.”
“That charlatan. I hate him.”
“You’ve never met him.”
“I hate him for what he’s doing to you in your time of grief.” Lek covers his face, lest I see my suffering there. He has become like the picture of Dorian Gray: I see in him the reality I dare not see in myself. I turn away.
“I’m not really a genius. It’s just that my English sometimes gives me an advantage. D’you know how I guessed about the pebble and the imago and the trepanning? It’s all in the titles of the books and screenplays-”
Lek wipes his face and tuts. “I don’t give a shit how you did it, I only care about you, and that Tibetan witch is destroying you.” He stares at me with simple country love, then calls for a can of beer. When the Singha arrives he says, “Drink it.”
“I can’t, Lek,” I say, shuddering slightly at the can and its implications.
“If you love me, if you have any regard left for me, drink it.”
“Lek-”
“You’re scared, aren’t you? That’s an artificial high you’re on, I think you were smoking dope last night while you were reading witchcraft-”
“It’s not witchcraft, it’s Tibetan Buddhism-”
“So, if it’s not witchcraft, drink a can of beer. Just one. I’ve seen you sink ten in a row. But you’re terrified of the comedown, aren’t you? Just one little can of beer bursts your balloon-that’s why he’s a charlatan, that Tibetan witch.”
Wearily, because I love him, I guess-he might be the only one left-I drink the beer. He’s right, the very modest intake of alcohol bursts the bubble. I feel the onset of paranoia. Lek pays for the food and takes my hand, leads me to the nearest cab. It doesn’t matter that we’re going to sit in a traffic jam, it’s the relative privacy of the backseat Lek is looking for. When I close my eyes I see what is always there, like a video playing on the back of my forehead: a car-it was a silver Toyota Echo-taking the turn into the soi, hitting my six-year-old son, Pichai, where he was standing in the street after getting out of a taxi. Chanya only slightly injured in her left foot, refusing help, taking Pichai to the hospital, calling me on my cell phone. I arrived at the operating theater just in time for his death.