Except that Vikorn and Zinna might have to form a temporary partnership if they want the Tibetan off their backs. Sooner or later it must occur to their lordships, as it has occurred to me, that there are plenty of other potential buyers in Southeast Asia, including someone in Phnom Penh said to be very close to the chief of police, who might jump into the vacuum and buy up the whole of Tietsin’s stock. But can these two old barons suspend their feud for long enough to protect Thailand from a hostile takeover by a Khmer upstart? Do sharks share lunch boxes?
“We just have to make sure she doesn’t know anything,” I explain. “Apparently she keeps shooting her mouth off about cops being behind her, but she doesn’t seem to have any names or contact numbers.”
“Who was her contact here?”
“Some farang in Kaosan Road. He’s just a low-level platoon manager-he never has more than five mules working for him at any one time, and he doesn’t know anyone above his manager, who is another farang who doesn’t speak Thai.”
“So how did she get busted at all?” Lek wants to know.
“Exactly. Someone’s infiltrated our organization at an overseas outpost.”
“ Kathmandu?”
“Right.”
“Vikorn has people in Kathmandu?”
“Not exactly. They are remote subcontractors, but they do supply quite a lot of low-level mules, like Mary Smith.”
“So why not just go to the subcontractors in Kathmandu?”
I scratch my ear. “You ever have anything to do with Hindus? They have such huge extended families. You start out thinking you’re with the eldest son, then it turns out he’s fronting for an uncle, who is fronting for one of his cousins, who’s fronting for the patriarch on the mother’s side, and so on.” I raise my palms to the Buddha: “We don’t really know who they are.”
“You don’t have names?”
“Sure. Narayan or Shah. Same as fifty percent of the phone book.”
“No addresses?”
I cough. “That’s what we’re trying to get. The address of our subcontractors in Nepal. Our firewalls are so good, only the mules seem to know.”
When my phone explodes with Must be some way out of here, I see that it is Sukum calling, and share a wink with Lek. I’ve already told him that the Fat Farang Case has taken a bizarre twist which may have Sukum and Mad Moi working together again.
“She’s gone,” Sukum says in an excited voice. “Fled. I checked with her probation officer. I even called her sister, the one who talks to me, and the pharmacy where she usually gets her prescription drugs for her mental problems. None of them has seen her in more than five weeks.”
“Five weeks? That’s a long time before he was killed. Doesn’t sound like proof of murder to me.”
“Five weeks, three weeks, two days, what’s the diff? I’m being intuitive here, cutting out unnecessary paperwork, like you. The point is, she hasn’t been near her probation officer, so she’s risking jail time. So it’s drastic. She’s on the run. Look, do I know her or not?”
“Nobody knows Doctor Moi like you, Khun Sukum,” I say, sharing a grin with Lek, who has gone into a devastating mime of Sukum, including his compulsive teeth cleaning and his zippy little farts. This colors the tone of my voice, which causes Sukum to suspect flippancy. Sukum loathes flippancy because he doesn’t understand it, even though he’s been trying all his life.
“You’re being flippant?” he wants to know.
“No. Not at all.”
“You’re putting two and two together, yes? Just before the murder she disappeared?”
“Okay, Detective Sukum, okay, I accept your expert advice. But we do need to know exactly why she disappeared, d’you see? A suspect who disappears five minutes after the criminal act is not at all the same as a suspect who makes themselves scarce a month before the event.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Assuming guilt in both cases, the second will have a cast-iron alibi.”
“I’ll check,” Sukum says without nuance, and closes his phone.
What with the day going to sleep on us, and the traffic hardly shifting-even though we have made the crucial turn from Asok onto Sukhumvit, we are now stuck behind a builder’s truck in the gridlocked outside lane, which we need in order to access the turnoff for the highway, so it looks like we’re in for the long haul-Lek and I cannot resist running through some of the old Sukum and Moi stories, and the way she always seems to get the better of him.
After a low-speed chase that lasted for most of Sukum’s career as a detective, he was only able to bust her on cannabis cultivation and tax evasion, even though everyone knows she arranged for the deaths of two of her four ex-husbands and ran her own yaa baa production unit as a cottage industry for more than ten years. She took revenge on Sukum by paying a tea lady to slip LSD into the detective’s morning iced lemon tea; Lek mimes Sukum on a paranoid acid trip to a disturbing level of accuracy: Sukum crawled under his desk, curled up in fetal position, and shivered there for almost an hour, periodically yelling for his Toyota, before we called the medics to give him a tranquilizer and take him away. The LSD had to come from Moi-this was the midnineties, when acid had disappeared more or less completely from world markets and nobody except a trained chemist like the Doctor herself could have synthesized it.
When the cab finally passes the tollbooth and we’re speeding toward Suvarnabhum we’re entertaining each other with speculations of how Doctor Moi will stitch Sukum up this time. I have to say, it’s fun sometimes to watch Lek’s darker side. As he points out, We’re all dual, darling.
“But what’s so amazing about her is the way she always manages to look so good in those HiSo magazines. How does she even get invited to those fantastic parties, that’s what I would like to know.”
“She’s old money,” I explain. “Teochew-her people originally hailed from Swatow about a hundred and fifty years ago, where they were members of one of the triad societies. Apparently her family is quite senior in one of them. While she was growing up her grandfather maintained mob connections and ran the triad’s secret banking system in Bangkok, which has tentacles all over the Pacific Rim. Most of the capital came from opium in the thirties, so she and her sisters were brought up like princesses. Her father encouraged her to follow her interest in pharmacy right up to the doctorate level. He thought she was going to start a retail chain, financed by his money. He didn’t know she’d fallen in love with drugs for their own sake in her midteens. She was one of those people who see life in terms of chemicals at an early age, and there’s nothing you can do about it. She started one corner shop on Soi Twenty-three, which was closed most of the time while she experimented with her stock. After being patient for nearly a decade, the respectable drug companies wouldn’t supply her anymore, and she let the business go bankrupt, even though she’s fantastically rich. Her family have not disowned her-after all, she’s only got convictions for minor offenses, and it’s not certain she killed two of her husbands.”