“What’s his name?”
“Hofmann, after the chemist who first synthesized LSD. But Hofmann prefers smack, don’t you sweetheart?”
Right on cue, Hofmann growls and buries his head under her arm. I let a few beats pass. When she makes no attempt to speak, I say, “Doctor, I have a document here signed by Colonel Vikorn-”
To my surprise she holds up a hand. “Please, let’s not do business yet. So few distinguished visitors come by river, I feel a need to show you around. And it’s such a beautiful moment in the evening.” A gracious smile without a hint of irony.
So we just hang there for a while, the Doctor and I, suspended in the night as if we were swinging on hammocks slung between stars, drinking our cocoa. Moi seems in a kind of trance, unwilling to face the practical challenge of standing up again. It occurs to me that by this time in the evening she might have taken something stronger than cocoa with cognac. I insert my first forensic question as gently as I can, hoping to reach a mind which has dropped its defenses.
“Did Frank Charles often join you here?”
“Mmm.” The murmur is so low it is almost inaudible. “Lots. He loved it here. He even tried to buy me out. I said no. Anyway, he could never have survived next to the shantytown-they would have eaten him alive. He was a bourgeois, he didn’t know how to deal with slaves. He would have been too nice.” She lets a beat pass. “He used to smoke cannabis here that I got for him from Humboldt County. He would smoke dope, get despondent-his love problem kept cropping up-and then, of course, the whole beautiful evening was forgotten. One would have to watch his mind shrink all the way back into his testicles-which, being a farang, he mistook for his heart.” A grimace. “You know, I would never consent to be a man. I’d simply have it all cut off and become a katoey.”
“You’ve never wanted children, Doctor?”
She shudders by way of answer. “Pets die. Children are a pain in the ass for the duration.”
She seems unwilling to leave the balcony or to waste time on talk, and I feel pretty much the same way. I try to intuit my way into the skin of Frank Charles: how exotic it must have seemed to him at first, to hang out under a tropical moon with an authentic Chinese murderess-and a beauty, in her austere way-who spoke better English than he and whose conversation was wittier than his. And a pharmacist, too! Surely he would have wanted to develop the relationship further? Not sexually, of course-Moi was not joking when she said she despised carnal love-but I think he sought one of those kinds of friendships farang nowadays dream of: more reliable than family, and a lot more fun. “Did he talk much about his film?” I mumble, hardly audible even to myself, but I’ve noticed how good Moi’s hearing is.
“Mmm.”
“You know the one I mean, Doctor?”
“Mmm.”
“What did he say about it?”
“I can’t remember. Mostly it was the artistic self-pity thing with him. How much he’d put into it in money and effort. How it consumed him but he never got it finished. He liked to make sure I realized it was not a schmaltz production like the others, it was serious, he was giving it his best shot, every detail had to be perfect.”
She takes a toke of her cheroot and exhales so slowly I’ve given up hope of more information, when she adds, “He couldn’t seem to get the ending right.”
Maybe she feels she’s said too much, for she stands slowly and invites me into the house. We cross the great polished teak balcony together and she steps inside to formally welcome me with a wai.
A finely carved Taoist temple table in blackwood: incense writhes upward and curls around two portraits of a man and woman in Qing dynasty costume, with their hair pulled back in queues, staring at us out of the past. I cast an eye at Doctor Moi.
“My great-grandfather on my father’s side, with his third wife, my grandfather’s mother. If not for Mao and the revolution I probably would have been brought up on the family estate in Swatow, with ornamental gardens and pavilions where one spent the summer. I might have had my feet bound, and I would certainly have been an opium addict.” She looks at me. “I long for that lost elegance. After all, I love opium and I never walk anywhere.”
She has taken the cheroot out of her mouth and straightened her back, as if the portraits are realer to her than the living and more deserving of respect, while I take in the rest of the room. There’s an underlying masculinity in the discipline, but the colors are subtle and fine. I say, “I’m looking for a teddy bear.”
She nods thoughtfully, as if in agreement. “I know. For the past twenty years I’ve kept him in a syringe.”
She takes me to a small and cozy library and even offers me a peek at the main bedroom. I’m wondering why she is being so hospitable, when I feel a sudden lift in the area of my brow. I turn to her in surprise.
“That wasn’t cognac in the cocoa, Doctor.”
“Did I say cognac? I must have had a blonde moment. Don’t worry, you didn’t drink anything I didn’t also drink.” She snorts. “And anyway, we’re not married, so there’s no need to kill you.”
“Can I at least know what it is?”
“No, it’s too rare and exciting, and the name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“What’s it going to do?”
“It’s going to solve the case for you. Isn’t that what you want?”
I don’t know if the reason I can’t concentrate is because the drug has started to work on me or because I’m afraid it has started to work on me. “Can we go back out on the balcony?”
As soon as we get there I slip with a sigh into the wicker chair and become mesmerized by the moon. Now I’m beginning to understand the mood she was in when I arrived. “You were already on this stuff when I showed up, weren’t you?”
“Mmm. How do you like it?”
“It’s too good. You’re a witch.”
“Mmm. Now, what was it you were saying about a letter from Colonel Vikorn?”
“It’s not going to work, Doctor, I’m not giving it to you until you’ve done a lot of explaining. That’s what I came to tell you.”
“A pot of cocoa for the letter?”
“No.”
She lets a few beats pass. “Do you realize that without my help you will never in your entire life feel as good as this again?”
I groan. “Yes.”
“But unlike earlier versions of this family of molecules, with this one you remember every ecstatic minute the next day, in glorious color, but without the ecstasy, which is replaced by an unendurable nostalgia for the lost high that will have you crawling up the wall.”
“I see.”
“But the worst of it is, you are only at the beginning of the trip. It’s going to get better and better and better-so good you won’t believe it. And then it will end. Unless I give you some more cocoa.”
“I got the picture, Doctor Moi.”
“And don’t even think of trying to bust me. That stuff is prescribed by my personal physician in Amsterdam, and it’s not my fault you came here uninvited and drank my cocoa before I could warn you what was in it.”
“I already know what your defense will be.”
“You have unusual resistance,” she says with a touch of chagrin.
“Whatever this is, it can’t compare to the blade wheel.”
“Blade wheel?” She repeats the phrase as if she has heard it before and tuts irritably.
“It cuts through everything. Even your chemicals.”
After a long, languid pause. “I see. Well, what was it you wanted to know?”
I find I am unable to answer, not because my mind has gone blank but because it has acquired such a crystalline clarity, such a sharpness of definition in both thought and sense, that I don’t want to waste the moment on work. Especially when I can read the file in the night sky. Time passes, but I have lost the measure of it.