Why am I doing this? Why? My son is dead, I don’t need to worry about college fees ever again, and my partner has left me to go to a monastery. I don’t need the dough! But I’m stuck in this filthy continuum. I’m not even particularly afraid of dying. But I’m stuck in this filthy continuum. Last night I dreamed of future victims, all of whom looked like the girl on the autopsy table: vivid images of kids with giant hypodermic needles sticking out of their skulls. I’m not made for this line of work, and yet everyone thinks I am, including Vikorn, Zinna, and Tietsin.
Why not concentrate on the Fat Farang file, you want to know? Well, apart from wallowing in a dark mood of self-disgust, I’ve decided to let Doctor Moi sweat for a few days. I also need to rethink the whole strategy. So I decide to go to temple.
This time I go to the hyper-sacred Wat Bowonniwet. On my way in the back of a cab I think I’m too tense, too uptight, too scared for a successful meditation. But when I’m on my knees giving the Buddha the high wai, I feel Tietsin’s blade wheel start to spin. It is different on each occasion; this time I conceive it as a great Ferris wheel with giant spadelike cutters lumbering toward me. I know not to give in to terror; I know I have to stand my ground. And it turns out that the extreme state of mind induced by the hallucination reveals my true nature: bitter. At bottom with me it is not old-fashioned greed like Vikorn’s, or lust, like Zinna’s-those two vices show at least a desire to be happy, however misguided. No, with me it has always been a clinging to bitterness as the last word on reality-like a modern thriller that leaves out all positive emotion and ends up as just a production line of death. But bitterness about what?
The blade wheel cuts a micron deeper with every turn. If I’m honest, the bitterness seems to have been there all along, a kind of reluctance, even at my age, to be fully born into this catastrophe called life. It has been lying there forever, this perverse reluctance, driving everything. Do you know what I mean, mon semblable, mon frère?
Two days later the documents have arrived from Zurich. Wow! Those banking lawyers really know how to pad! The old boys have to sign four copies with initials on every page, so the whole package-which I send out in neat A4-sized envelopes, plus red stickers with yellow arrows which tell them where to put their monikers-is about the size of a large hardback novel and just as heavy. When I get Lek to take Vikorn’s copies upstairs and then send the other set to his army chum for onward transshipment to General Zinna, he lets his long skinny katoey arms sag under the weight. Then I have to nag and cajole both Vikorn and Zinna to actually sign the things; they’re intimidated by the sheer size of the package and all that small print. Worst of all, they don’t like using their ID cards when they go to the notary to sign. Also, Vikorn is nervous. The truth is that he has never dealt in such a large single shipment. Somehow, Tietsin got both old men into a mood of high bravado, and now that it’s pay-up time, our godfathers are getting twitchy; they’ve never dealt with a Tibetan before. If, by some unforeseeable stroke of misfortune, they lost their forty million, they would both be in serious trouble. Zinna would be wiped out.
Finally, it’s all done, and I send the stuff off to Zurich so they can register the corporation in Lichtenstein. I’m not sure there are any people in Lichtenstein; maybe there’s just a large population of registered offices with a single robot to post letters and send them. Has anyone you know ever been there? You soon get into the did-they-really-land-on-the-moon mind-set, dealing with the virtual world of high finance. Then, out of the blue, a package addressed to me arrives at my home. It seems to have been sent by ordinary airmail from somewhere in Hawaii. I think: Hawaii? But the package makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Why is that? Oh, only because the bubblepak envelope is one of those designed exclusively for the shipment of DVDs. I am strangely reluctant to open it. I even leave it lying on the teak coffee table that Chanya and I bought at Chatuchak market on one of our lighthearted shopping sprees about a thousand years ago when the world was still innocent.
When I get to work, I tell myself I’m being quite girlishly silly, and after ten minutes staring at my computer monitor and consulting the online I-Ching and the Yahoo! astrology page, both of which are wildly enthusiastic about my love prospects today, I sigh and take a cab back home. When I pick the package up from the coffee table, I experience the same sensation as before: hairs standing to paranoid attention, something crawling up my back, a distinct premonition of death. Whose? Okay, okay, I’m opening it. Now I have it, an unmarked disk, shining brilliantly on one side; it is a Sony DVD, charcoal black on the reverse side with no title. I blow out my cheeks and scratch my ear before sliding it into my DVD player. At first I think it must be some kind of joke, for nothing appears on the screen. When I check the numbers flicking by on the counter, however, I see it must be a full-length movie of some kind. Finally, the monitor flickers into life-and there he is.
35
The Frank Charles standing before the camera is not quite as overweight as his cadaver. I think he must have filmed the introduction to his movie at least a year before he died. He appears to be looking directly at me when he says, “Hi, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep-unless something has gone badly wrong, you are the one watching this movie, and, from what I know of you, you are probably alone.
“I guess you never expected to hear from me, huh? I am assuming you are the one running the investigation into my murder, because you always get the farang murders in District Eight. But even if I’m wrong, you have certainly heard of me and my spectacular manner of death. You are aware of the existence of a film. If you found the DVD in my safe, you also discovered it was just a set of preliminary shots of Nepaclass="underline" not what you were looking for at all. You and your colleagues have also failed to discover whodunit. That will all be explained in the next two hours. What you need to know right now, though, is: why you?”
What is interesting to me right now is that the camera follows Frank Charles as he paces a little with his jaw in his hand; he is not alone, therefore, although you would never know it from his posture of total self-absorption. He carries his weight well, as a big man can, and does not thrust his gut forward in arrogance; one gets some sense of what it must have been like to have lived in the skin of that big, male, energetic, once-superb American animal. From his body language one understands that, before something went badly wrong, the world had belonged to him. Now he thrusts his hands into the pockets of his oversized denim overalls; there is a microphone attached to one of the straps.
“It’s ironic, because there is someone else who thinks she’s the muse behind this work. Let’s say she’s mistaken. She’s not the muse. She’s what you might call a point producer-the one who makes sure certain vital props are at hand. No, I needed someone with your eye, Detective, the one I could not fool, even when I tried my damnedest.”
He pauses and makes an almost comic gesture of humility and defeat. “I swear to God, Detective, that as far as I know there are only two people in the world who didn’t think much of my first full-length movie. You and me. You saw the plagiarism-so did I. And in your review you had no mercy. The little scene I stole from Truffaut, those long interior shots that Bertolucci perfected, playing with color à la Robert Altman, outdoor shots from John Ford, suspense from Hitchcock-and a lot of other thefts, too: you saw it all. You must have had one hell of a teacher at film school. Except you never went to film school, did you? That’s another thing about you that told me you are the one: your permanent pariah status in your society. Not only are you a leuk kreung, a half-caste, but your mother’s illustrious lovers taught you way above your station. One of them must have been an old-style French-movie buff, a real Cahiers du Cinéma type. Whatever. I’ll never know what you will say about what you are about to see. That’s not important. What’s important is that you understand.”