Moi looks straight ahead into the infinite traffic. When she finally clears her throat, she begins with the immortal words, “You are half Thai, perhaps there is enough Asian blood in you to understand there is such a thing as the world of the dead?”
I think I was prepared for anything except that sentence. I give her a double take and say, “World of the dead?” But she seems not to hear me. On the contrary, she is sitting bolt upright with a grimace of concentration on some internal object. Then she starts to talk. She is leaning forward slightly, utterly absorbed in some inner vision, and her words seem to be an earnest attempt to describe what she is seeing. Unfortunately, she is speaking in Teochew, so I cannot understand a word of it. Carefully, so as not to interrupt her trance, I reopen the glass partition a couple of inches, so the driver is exposed to her words. His reaction, after a couple of minutes, is to maneuver the Benz to the inside lane, then, when the traffic finally starts to move, he turns into a side soi. Now he has picked up his cell phone and is making a call. When he closes the phone, he turns to me. “You better go. The maid will come to take care of her. She took a bright red pill when she was with you, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
The driver shakes his head. “It’s opium based and the worst in her collection. Every time she takes it she goes into a trance and talks to her ancestors. She’s not really here at all. You better leave, she can be quite unpleasant when the effects wear off.”
I see that for some reason he doesn’t want me to be here when the maid arrives. I say okay, get out, and start to walk back to the gridlock on Sukhumvit. After a few yards, I turn to look back. The driver is in the car again behind the wheel. He has opened the partition all the way and is listening with rapt attention to her bulletin from the Far Shore.
37
Sukum vomited at the end of the movie. He watched it all through with unnerving intensity, then threw up where he sat on my floor with the laptop. I had to fetch a towel, then wait while he took a shower and changed into some of my clothes, which are too big for him. All this seemed to take place in a time-free zone, with him in a kind of trance after the film, moving slowly and saying almost nothing. I can understand why he might have been revolted or shocked, but Frank Charles’s masterpiece seems to be having a different kind of effect on him. I sense that Sukum understands it on a deeper level than I am able to penetrate. But he’s not a movie buff at all; I don’t think he’s ever watched anything more challenging than Spider-Man.
When we emerge from my house, it’s raining and I remember we are in for the fallout from some gigantic tropical storm that has been pummeling Vietnam. The sky is slate gray, and the winds from the east are shaking the tops of trees like rag dolls. In a cab on the way to the station, I find his silence unnerving and try to talk about the case. “What about Moi’s other two husbands, the ones who survived-did you investigate them when you were trying to nail her?”
“Sure,” he grunts.
“And?”
“The first marriage lasted four years, the other six months. Her first husband was a Hong Kong Chinese. The second an American.”
I note that he’s answering more like a suspect than a cop, giving the minimum of information for each question, but I let it ride. “Four years? It’s hard to imagine Moi sticking out a marriage for that length of time.”
“She didn’t. She was still young and trying to fit into the rules of her class, so she pretended the marriage was working. In fact, it failed after the first few months. Her husband found excuses to travel to Hong Kong and Taiwan a lot and after a while only visited Thailand rarely, until they formally announced they were divorcing.”
“And the other, the American?”
Sukum allows himself a thin smile. “That guy was no fool. He got the vibes early on and totally freaked after a year. He jumped on a plane to the States, but kept up some kind of business connection.”
I say, “Business connection?” as any cop would, but Sukum won’t look me in the eye. “A business connection with the ex-wife, isn’t that something we need to explore?”
“Why?” Sukum says, looking out of the window. “We’re not investigating her, are we? We have a suicide, right?”
I decide not to press the point. “And the other two, the ones who died?”
“One was English; he died of a heart attack when he was only in his late thirties. The other was also farang, a Frenchman, he was hit by a small truck on Soi Eleven. Moi was out of the country on both occasions, which made everyone suspicious, but the autopsies didn’t throw up anything sinister so there were no serious police investigations.”
Detective Sukum falls into a heavy silence once again, as if he has returned to a place in which Frank Charles’s last movie plays over and over. Finally, I say, “What is it, Detective? I know it’s a pretty bloody ending to that film, but you’re a cop, for Buddha’s sake.”
I think he will not drag himself out of his trance, he takes so long to answer. After about five minutes he seems to hear my question for the first time, and turns his face to stare at the streets through the curtain of rain. Already the drains are overflowing with the volume of water, turning the street into a dirty yellow river. Sukum says, “She killed him long before he finished the movie. She sapped his strength, stole his soul. That’s why he had to die-that big speech at the beginning, that’s just a farang caught in a spider’s web and trying to be smart and rational about it.”
“Moi? How can you know that?”
“It’s what she did to me,” he says, and holds his head with both hands. “The more I worked on her case, the slower my mind became. She was turning me into a zombie. D’you know how many times I screwed up the paperwork to get her prosecuted on tax evasion? And a thousand little things went wrong with my private life. My marriage collapsed, and now it’s just a cold, empty sham. Then she had the tea lady at the station slip me that LSD. Sure, I had a bad trip, but there was a lot more than that behind it. It was a bad trip that’s lasted nearly ten years. My life has never been the same since I investigated her. I’ve had no luck at all. Every day is hard work, battling demons at every turn. I’ve tried every kind of amulet-cat’s eyes, antlers, khot stones, Buddha images. I even had a salika inserted under my skin. And Buddha knows how many monk baskets I’ve donated.”
His fear of Moi is so tangible, I reach out to touch his arm. He turns eyes on me that could be described as limpid pools of paranoia. “Look, maybe you were right from the start. This case has your name all over it. I want you to have it. When I get a chance I’ll ask the Old Man to formally sign it over to you so everyone will know you solved it, not me.” His eyes contract somewhat; he seems to be wrestling with guilt when he adds, “I’m sorry.”
When I continue to stare at him, he says, “You still don’t get it, do you? You lost control of this investigation the moment you visited her at her house. You just haven’t realized it yet. You have no idea how powerful she is.” He lets a few beats pass. “Of course, as a cop I could never tell anyone. They would have kicked me out for reasons of mental health. Or snuffed me. I’m telling you now because you’re already caught in her trap.” He lets a couple of beats pass, then adds, “I think you know what I mean.”