“I know,” I groan. “I just knew he would take it the wrong way. What can I do?”
Vikorn stands up, comes around his desk with his hands in his pockets, looks me up and down. “I saw the way you were walking, down in the street.”
“You saw the way I was walking?” My hands are clammier than ever.
“Yes, I saw the way you were walking.”
He is now very close. “How was I walking?”
“Like a man thinking of running.” He puts a hand on my shoulder to force me deeper into the chair and gazes at me for a long moment. “It’s not really Zinna who is making the green balls run down your trouser legs.”
“No? So what is it?”
“The power of forty million dollars. You are a monk manqué, you have survived so far by dodging reality. Your life can only be sustained as long as you believe your hands are clean. But they’re not. In truth, nobody’s are, but people like you, dreamers, like to kid themselves. Well, now you can’t kid yourself anymore, can you?” He leans over his desk to pick up a bundle of documents in English from his in-box. “Here.” I see they are the powers of attorney, signed and notarized by both Zinna and Vikorn. I look up at him, baffled. “You said it was hyper-urgent, so Zinna and I both got notaries to come to our offices, and Zinna sent me his copy by motorcycle messenger. We were afraid you would scold us again for being third-world morons who don’t understand high finance, so we jumped to it. Now you are a plenipotentiary for forty million bucks. Careful how you spend it.”
“Th-, th-, thanks,” I say.
He is merciless. He won’t stop staring at me, but he won’t dismiss me either. Finally, he says, “It’s okay, Zinna isn’t afraid you’ll cheat us.”
“He isn’t?”
“No. He’s afraid you’ll snap and do something even stupider, like have a nervous breakdown. That would really be hard to deal with. A fraud we could handle in the usual way; a psychotic meltdown would be a problem.”
“It’s guilt,” I explain. “Guilt is warping my mind.”
Vikorn frowns. “Guilt? About what?”
“Oh, nothing in particular,” I say, shaking my head. How could anyone possibly feel guilty about trafficking in forty million dollars’ worth of smack? What a pale and cloistered fellow I must be. “Like you say, I’m a monk manqué. May I resign?”
“No,” Vikorn says.
“But it must be such a liability to you, having an honest man as consigliere.”
Vikorn points to the documents. “Honest? Those papers prove you’re a crook, like the rest of us. Maybe that’s what you were trying to run away from.”
Obviously, he is enjoying this most excruciating initiation of mine. He even lets me have a jolly Take care, now as I leave his office with the powers of attorney.
Back at my desk, though, a sense of relief sets in. Apparently I’m not going to be kidnapped and tortured today. I order an iced lemon tea from the tea lady, and sit back for a moment. Now another side of my mind is getting creative. Forty million! Imagine. I could get on a plane to Zurich right now, have the dough transferred to a numbered account, dedicate-say-ten million to personal security (there are semisecret corporations which employ people like retired SAS and Navy SEALs), buy five different properties in five different countries, all in proxy names, and live happily ever after, right? Wrong. Not with an imagination like mine. When my endlessly calculating mind projects itself into such a future, I see only sleepless nights during which I am convinced the maid is a spy for Zinna and the security guards all secretly work for Vikorn. Forget it. Cowardice will keep me an honest consigliere.
The silver lining to this unnerving day comes in the unlikely form of a text message from Sukum:
Keep tonight free. You will be contacted.
Except that I’m not supposed to know it’s from Sukum; he has used someone else’s SIM card. I let that cook in the right lobe while the left organizes the dispatch of the powers of attorney. Even this minor chore is not without complications. I certainly cannot use the police dispatch department, nor can I have a courier company visit the station. Now I have to lie about where I’m going-suddenly I am harboring a kind of internal schoolmistress who frowns at every tiny transgression-and I feel quite Macbethian as I sneak out to get on the back of a motorbike to go find a FedEx or DHL courier office: Returning were as tedious as to go o’er, or something like that. At the same time I am able to tell myself that all I am doing at this moment is sending off a bunch of legal documents to a lawyer in Zurich. I’m a white-collar gangster. So why do I feel so awful?
It happens there is a FedEx office not far from Nana. After I’ve sent the docs I feel the need for a beer, so I hang out for an hour at a bar at the entrance to the plaza. It’s too early for the go-go bars, and the girls who serve in the beer bar are not especially pushy, although any of them would “take a shower” with me at one of the short-time hotels if I asked nicely. Suddenly they all seem so innocent. Even the older, more hardened women who have been on the Game for a decade reveal themselves to me as essentially innocent: women who got stuck in the continuum of prostitution but never really allowed it to contaminate their souls. I’m in a bad way, and the best future I can see for myself would be something totally clean and spiritual with Tara. Indeed, she has suddenly popped into my mind as a perfect representation of a pure human souclass="underline" inconvenient proof that such a thing is possible in this filthy lifetime.
For the first time in the Fat Farang Case I’m actually pleased to hear from Sukum, even though he is using yet another anonymous SIM card. His text reads,
Under the bridge near the Port Authority buildings at Klong Toey tonight at ten p.m.
The bridge is directly opposite Mimi Moi’s house on the Chao Phraya River.
39
We are waiting under the bridge at Klong Toey. Sukum has not shaved today and is wearing baggy army-surplus shorts, an old black T-shirt, and flip-flops. He is doing river peasant, in other words, and flatly refuses to say where we are going. On the other hand, he has made it clear that he is risking life and limb by taking me to wherever he is taking me; he will not confirm or deny that Mad Moi’s house is our destination.
The ferryman, when he arrives, is stunningly ugly. His canoe is old and a couple of the seats are smashed, as if it has been rescued from a wreck; his bare arms and chest are covered in prison tattoos and there are vicious facial scars which spell knife fight to a cop’s eyes. He doesn’t speak when we climb into his boat, and starts the tinny little outboard with a vicious pull on the starter cord. We cross the broad black river in silence except for the motor, which the boatman cuts when we are about a hundred yards from Moi’s jetty. Now there are only the faintest river sounds: the diminutive wash of the boat’s bows, a fish or water rat breaking the surface, voices from the opposite shore faintly carrying across the river. Moi’s house is in darkness. Instead of aiming for the jetty with the motor cut, however, the ferryman takes out an oar and maneuvers us silently around a headland so that we end up tied to a stump of tree, facing Moi’s place across the water. I watch in disbelief as Sukum reaches into a bag he has brought and shows me a pair of night-vision binoculars. He raises them to his eyes, makes a few adjustments, and hands them to me.
As my eyes adjust to the green tincture, I see nine monks sitting in a semicircle on Moi’s terrace, with their backs to the house, facing the river. They seem to be chanting, but in such low voices they are inaudible even across the water. But they are not monks. I made that assumption because they are sitting the way monks sit and wearing robes. But those are not monks’ robes, I now realize. They are black gowns with hoods which obscure the faces of the chanting men. Sukum urges me to scan the rest of Moi’s property. When I do so I see that the path from the jetty to the house has been modified so that there are now three makeshift bamboo arches, which you would have to pass under if you were planning to reach the house from the river. I’m frowning at Sukum to ask for some kind of explanation, when the first of the boats arrives. It is a snakehead boat about sixty feet long, and seems quite full of people, who get out at the jetty and stand around, waiting. Now another boat appears, a rowboat, with only three people in it. One of the people-they seem all to be men-is blindfolded and has to be helped from the boat to the jetty, and then led carefully along the jetty to the land. One of the prisoner’s minders pulls off the blindfold, causing me to gasp. It is a member of parliament who recently changed political parties. I turn to Sukum, but he shakes his head vigorously and urges me to keep watching. I stare as one of the officials of the ceremony, who seems to act as a kind of hierophant, shows the new initiate a piece of bamboo; it must have words written on it, for the neophyte is reading from it, after which he makes a humble wai three times in the direction of Moi’s house, then takes off his shoes, socks, and upper garment. Bare-chested now, he is taken under the three arches, at each of which he stops and recites a few words, apparently repeating each phrase three times. Eventually he reaches the terrace of the house, which has been modified for the occasion. Moi’s ancestor portraits are now hanging there over the blackwood shrine, which has been brought out from the interior. Moi and her maid are sitting in large rattan chairs with peacock backs that look like thrones. The ones in black gowns continue to chant. There is a pile of something on the blackwood shrine which glitters greenly in the night-vision glasses. The balcony is full of people sitting on the floor, all of whom seem to be men except for Moi and her maid.