All this while the receptionist has been growing more and more irritated at the time Sukum is spending in the movie room with the security guard. It doesn’t help that every now and then some of the synthetic cries and groans escape into the corridor. I knock and tell Sukum to come examine the bust of the victim in the Jacuzzi. He emerges shame-faced, rubbing his eyes, unable to look into mine. The porn seems to have done something to his head beyond the obvious. I think I can guess where his mind is going.
When Captain James Cook sailed into the harbor the British would impertinently call Sydney, the aboriginals on the shore did not see his ships, because they had no mental concept of such things. They learned the hard way. I think something of the kind has happened to Sukum. He is seeing Frank Charles’s condo with new eyes, and his suspicions are confirmed when I point out the likeness the bust in the Jacuzzi bears to the American’s passport photograph. What Sukum had taken for the respectable residence of an eminent man of towering talent and ability-a level in life so exalted he did not trouble even to form an opinion of it and assumed the decor was no more than standard for a billionaire tribe he knew nothing about, a top-of-the-range lifestyle, in other words, which is perhaps the only grail the West aspires to-he is now experiencing as the most elaborate and useless expression of self-indulgence he could possibly imagine.
“It’s all just appetite,” he says, glaring at the bust. Then, like a good Buddhist, he turns his anger on himself. “This is where farang are leading us, isn’t it? Like me with my Toyota. If I had money I would fall into this trap, just the same. And maybe end up like him, thoroughly lost in an ego dream.”
I smile because he has jumped way ahead of me. I did not directly link the American’s narcissism to the exotic manner of his dying, I have too much farang blood for that; but to Sukum, who has no overview other than Buddhism, the operation of the law of cause and effect is obvious. I think he loses all motivation to find the killer for a moment, because, after all, the perp was the victim of nothing more or less than the inexorable law of karma. And also, just for the moment, the demon of ambition has quite deserted him, leaving only disgust. Now I’m seeing the penthouse with Sukum’s eyes. It’s the detail, the extraordinary effort by talented tradesmen and interior designers, the obscenely expensive perfection of the place which represents a blasphemous waste of energy and time by all concerned.
Then his mind, stretched to the end of its elastic, flips back to his factory settings. He turns almost aggressively to the receptionist. “Did the deceased own a car?”
“Yes, a Lexus.”
“What model?”
“The LS 460-top of the range.” Clearly she, too, has the Bangkok automobile virus.
“What color?”
“Gray with metallic finish.”
“Did he ever drive you in it?”
“Once he gave me a lift to the end of the road. It was like floating on air.”
Sukum nods solemnly, takes another glance at the bust, and shakes his head. He has inspired me, though, and I start to hunt around the penthouse.
“What are you looking for?”
“Something incongruous.”
Sukum has revealed to me an inadvertent flaw in the place: it is flawless. This is not natural; there must be something that does not fit, something that reveals whatever lays behind the American’s extravagance, something driving the self-hate that resulted in his obesity. I find it surprisingly easily, in the corniest of places: under a pillow in the master bedroom. The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross. I hold it by the spine upside down to see which pages the deceased most favored. It opens naturally at of the Peers translation. A thick horizontal pencil mark draws attention to the last paragraph of Book I, Chapter III:
But neither from these imperfections nor from those others can the soul be perfectly purified until God brings it into the passive purgation of that dark night whereof we shall speak presently.
When I try to figure out what resonance those words have for me, I find Tietsin’s blade wheel lurking in the shadows of my mind. At the back of the book someone has written in pencil, This burden is very hard to bear. Curiously, there is a date: September 21, 2007. Why would anyone bother to date a cry from the soul? Because (I check his passport again) it was his birthday. He was a Virgo on the cusp of Libra and exactly sixty years old when he wrote those words, assuming it is his handwriting. In the Chinese system, he was born in the Year of the Fire Boar; Fire Boars are horny and lucky with money.
So far I have not examined the computer in the bedroom that served as an office. When I do so, I find I need an entry code. What I am most interested in is e-mail messages which might not be downloaded onto the PC but could equally well be hanging out there in cyberspace requiring another code to access them. I decide to leave the computer to the forensic boys.
Back on the ground floor, Sukum resists the temptation to go look at the Lexus, and I ask the building manager to check with the company that runs the surveillance cameras to provide video copies of everyone who entered Frank Charles’s apartment over the past six months.
Sukum hangs next to me, apostate, and watches the residents come and go. Most are not farang, but neither are they Thai. The majority seem to be Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese, with plenty of Japanese, too. For the most part the farang residents do not seem to be American, but rather wealthy Swiss and German. They all have about them the careless sangfroid of the impenetrably rich, which was perhaps the only club to which Frank Charles could possibly have belonged. I think about that and ask the building manager to also provide statements from his staff that would enable us to identify regular visitors during the entirety of his residence. The manager checks his records and informs us the farang bought the apartment about five years ago and spent about half the year here in intervals of about two months at a time. A casual questioning of his staff suggests the American had very few visitors-perhaps none at all except when he brought girls back, which he did rarely, although there was a night when he arrived drunk at the head of a convoy of three taxis carrying ten young women whom the night staff automatically classified as prostitutes because of their Isaan accents. In accordance with the building’s strict security rules, copies of their ID cards were kept and will be made available to us as soon as they have been retrieved from the archives.
“Ten,” I say. The number, which did not seem out of the ordinary in the Rose Garden, now strikes me as grotesque.
“To go with the apartment and the Lexus,” Sukum says.
23
Forget men with long magic fingers who listen to the subtle sounds of locking mechanisms with mystic concentration; forget explosives, too. There’s only one sane way to bust open a safe in someone’s home: oxyacetylene. And for that you need steel bottles-one for the oxygen and one for the acetylene-some sheet steel to protect the floor, a guy in leathers with a giant cutting torch and a full face mask-and you need to move all the furniture out of the way.
Half of reception have come up to watch, and I couldn’t very well exclude Sukum and Lek. Women squeal while men grunt at the great cascade of sparks as the oxygen eats the iron. The cutter is making a circle around the safe’s lock, which glows dull red. The safe is of the kind you can buy on the main street, and not particularly strong. Even so, hardened steel plate doesn’t yield that easily, and I’m wondering if there is going to be anything left inside not charred to a cinder, when the door finally swings open a couple of inches and we are left standing in the particle-charged air with that peculiar stench of burnt iron. Now everyone is looking at me. The cutter hands me a thick wad of leather to use to open the red-hot door. The heat is pretty intense, but localized. What I’m most interested in is a DVD case in the bottom right corner. I gingerly put my hand into the oven, pull the case out. It’s only slightly molten, but when I open it, I see the DVD inside has curled with the heat. No way it’s going to even fit into a DVD player, and the microscopic laser etchings on the plastic will have been destroyed. There is no label on the disc, but someone has written on it in felt-tip pen: “Nepal/Tibet 2001/2.” There is nothing else in the body of the safe except for a sheet of paper that looks as if it had personal identity codes written in hand, but is now too burnt and brown to decipher.