Sukum has stopped smoking. The cigarette is held suspended between his fingers, and he is staring at it. He is unable to speak, so I continue: “In many ways Moi is an ideal priestess. As the eldest girl in a family which has dominated the Bangkok chapter of Kongrao for centuries, central casting could not have provided a better one. In other ways, though, she is a dangerous liability-because she really is half mad. So Kongrao needed someone to keep an eye on her: who better than her maid, on whom she has been emotionally and physically dependent all her life? Thus the maid is promoted to a kind of surrogate priestess herself, or perhaps a handmaiden to Moi, who also acts as master of ceremonies. And the maid is very shrewd, very controlled, and very Chinese. Nobody is surprised when she finds a way to make herself rich, this is natural, and she is respected for the way she makes a profit without harming the interests of the society. For the maid took the precaution of learning an awful lot about precious gems, especially sapphires. And especially a particular form of sapphire called padparadscha.”
I pause here to take in Sukum. He is still in a kind of terror trance, unwilling to allow his frozen body any freedom of movement. “Tell me, Khun Sukum, for I’m sure you know. Of all those guests at Moi’s house that night participating in the rites, how many were connected to the gem trade?”
“All of them,” he splutters. “The maid has been recruiting jewelers and gem traders for decades. In reality, she runs all of Thailand ’s precious stone rackets. No one gets to survive, especially not with sapphires, except by joining Kongrao, which means they’re under her thumb. Even the guests who weren’t gem traders, the politicians, senior lawyers, top cops-they’ve all been bought by the gem industry, through the maid’s maneuverings.”
“Yes. That’s what Johnny Ng said.”
I stop talking because I want to see what Sukum will say next. This is the most interesting point of the story, after all, but I’m not sure how much even he knows after a decade of investigations, all of which got blocked sooner or later. “And the maid, perhaps better than anyone in Kongrao, saw the risks of too much success-am I right?” I take out a collection of magazines from a plastic bag I have brought with me. Some of them are Western publications, but most are local; all of them could be described as trade publications for the gem industry. “And this is her brilliant strategy,” I say, pointing to a picture of a tuxedoed white man in the center spread of one of them. The caption explains at some length that the local guild of jewelers and gem dealers had decided to copy other high-end retail industries by appointing a kind of mascot or exotic representative, called an “ambassador,” who will be their public face to the West, where most of the customers live. The guild is proud to appoint Mr. Robert Thomson as honorary roving ambassador of the Thai gems industry.
“Put it away,” Sukum hisses.
“It’s her third husband, isn’t it? The first one to die young and tragically-a heart attack, I believe, while Moi and her maid were out of the country? Interesting that the maid persuaded the guild to appoint her mistress’s husband as its ambassador, don’t you think?”
Sukum is disinclined to speak, so I take out another, later copy of the same trade magazine. “Once again, the Thai guild of gem traders is appointing a farang to be its official ambassador. Once again the ambassador, a Frenchman named Marcel Legrand, also in a tuxedo, is honored to accept the appointment.” Legrand is the one who was hit by a truck. I raise my eyes at Sukum.
“She didn’t need to persuade them,” Sukum mutters. Finally, he decides to cut to the chase. “She had to share her scams with the others-the other gem traders, I mean. You have to look at the big picture. Kongrao wasn’t just cheating a few regional traders and retail outlets. It was bankrupting the gems industry in entire neighboring countries. Cambodia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, even Burma, all got stung.”
“I see. Therefore it would have been obvious from the start that sooner or later victims would retaliate. But who would they assassinate to avenge themselves for the massive frauds that had been perpetrated by the Thais? Thailand is a mysterious place not only for farang, but also for everyone who lives near us. Our language is largely impenetrable, and our businesses are, shall we say, dominated by families who know how to remain anonymous. And ninety percent of the trades in wholesale jewelry are never declared, for tax reasons.” Sukum nods. “So the smart thing was a form of sacrificial corrosion: let the farang mascot take the hit. After all, in such cases murders are largely symbolic. There’s never any way to get the lost investment back, but a well-executed vendetta always makes the aggrieved party feel better and allows you, after a respectful pause, to go on doing business in Asia.”
“Right,” Sukum says.
“I think Witherspoon and Johnny Ng were both too smart to take the bait. But Thomson and Legrand were not so fly. They both died, and in both cases the hit was perfectly executed: the cops did not find evidence of foul play.” Despite Sukum’s reluctance, I take out the more recent of the trade magazines-it is less than a year old-to flash a picture of Frank Charles, also in a tuxedo, also with a caption which declares him to be the new honorary representative of the Most Honorable Society of Thai Gem Traders. But Sukum is not disturbed by the photograph. He waves a hand at it. “That’s after my time,” he explains. “I don’t know anything about developments after I nailed her on tax evasion. You’re on your own now, there’s nothing more I can say. You’ve got the big picture. Whatever you find out from now on has nothing to do with me. You’ll have to get the rest from Moi.”
I nod respectfully, then notice he is tapping rather heavily on his ashtray. After he has gone I lift it up and find yet another of his newspaper cuttings. There is no date, but the clipping is yellowing:
Kontea, Tanzania: Not long ago Godot passed quickly through this tiny village in the deep South of this sleepy African country. Last year, during a routine pass by a gem-hunting corporation, “gravel” was found here: a technical term referring to certain unprepossessing small pebbles the color of raw prawns. They are near-worthless members of the sapphire family, but can be, and often are, indicators of the presence of their most valuable cousins. For a full six months the village was home to earth-moving and sieving equipment, mobile homes and offices, a cell phone pylon, and a small army of dependent industries including cooked food, laundry, and prostitution. Then, when it was confirmed that such sapphires as existed here were all of inferior quality with poor coloring and other flaws which made it impossible to market them profitably, the twenty-first century withdrew like a high tide, leaving plenty of detritus with the original villagers, who are scratching their heads and wondering if it has all been a dream. Said Mr. Jomo Matembele, shopkeeper: “We really thought we’d all been saved from poverty by God, but God went back North and now we have just a few white devils poking around the riverbed and buying up cheap stones for pennies.”
49
It’s late morning before I get around to thinking about Moi and the Frank Charles case again. Out of curiosity, and kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner, I check out padparadscha for myself on Wikipedia:
Because of its rarity, it is frequently fabricated via synthetics in laboratory settings, or on regular pink or orange sapphires by a process of beryllium surface diffusion. This diffusion process involves heating the stone along with crushed chrysoberyl, the source of the beryllium in the treatment.