The maid reappears with a cheroot, which she pops into Moi’s mouth and lights. Moi takes a long pull and exhales dense gray smoke. “Padparadscha came late to the land of Nippon-koku,” she begins with a half smile. “You might want to bear that in mind. But let’s get poor Frank out of the way first. It’s his damned film, isn’t it, that’s knocked you quite off track?” She looks at me with that form of condescending benevolence that inspires feelings of violent resentment in all sane people. But she won’t let up. “That’s so funny. And you a cop, too. But that was Frank, you see-the biggest charlatan of all. A real, professional, all-points-covered, state-of-the-art all-American graduate from that most celebrated academy of charlatans called Hollywood.” She waves a hand. “Oh, I don’t mean he didn’t actually do and feel all those romantic, sensitive, self-doubting, spiritual things. But they belonged to the pretend side of what he was, more like aspects of what he wanted to be. But I’ll give him one thing. For a full three weeks he really did intend to die just exactly the way he dies in that movie. That’s why he forced poor Ah Ting to be in it, you see? He was really going to pay her to kill him in that way, and-umm-Ah Ting didn’t mind. She hates all men, but especially the ones that get close to me, so she loved the rehearsals. And, as I’m sure you realize, there is no way any Thai cop who wants to stay alive would dream of arresting Ah Ting for anything. Kongrao wouldn’t let them-me you can arrest anytime, it won’t make any difference in the scheme of things. You see, she’s the real priestess now. She copes with the mumbo jumbo so much better than me. In fact, I think she really believes in it. After all, it’s made her quite magically rich, and at the end of the day she is a full-blooded, card-carrying, hyper-superstitious Chinese peasant.”
“So what happened?” I ask. “Frank Charles got himself into such a romantically suicidal state, such a lovelorn, obese, self-loathing late-life crisis that he was going to shock the world in the only way left to him-that is, by dying on-screen-thus ensuring the acclaim that had so eluded him in life. What happened?”
“He chickened out, of course. He was a child of cinema, of fantasy. I think he used drugs to keep his mind off what he intended to do, then when the crunch got closer, he stopped intending to do it. He was in quite a state. You see, he had no reliable addiction; even his fondness for chemicals was promiscuous.” She pauses to give me a long, appraising stare, perhaps to check if I’m ready for what comes next. “There’s only one thing harder to handle than a would-be suicide, and that’s a failed suicide.” She gives a brief smile. “I’m afraid Ah Ting caught him in a vulnerable moment when I was out, and strictly against my instructions told him about-ah-one of the little things Kongrao gets up to overseas.”
“She recruited him because she needed another scapegoat? Kongrao was moving into Japan?”
At the word Japan she gives a couple of blinks of acknowledgment. “But, you see, it wasn’t a case of ‘moving into’ Japan.” Here her face turns quite merry and she blows a long stream of smoke over the balcony. “We’d been supplying Japan for over a century. But a terrible thing happened to Japan after they lost the war. Half their psyche turned farang. That’s why they’re so confused. They rely on science instead of Asian intuition. It’s made them terribly vulnerable.” Now she is spluttering, trying not to collapse in laughter. “They have laboratories, d’you see? And in farangland, a fully accredited, properly staffed scientific laboratory is like the word of God. And just like God, it can be amazingly unreliable.” Now she cannot stop laughing. When the maid comes onto the terrace, perhaps to check on her, she, too, permits herself the ghost of a smile. Once she has seen that her mistress is okay, she retreats again into the dark teak interior. Moi shakes her head.
“Recruit him? Ah Ting recruit Frank Charles? A lawyer might frame it that way. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say she waved a carrot in front of him and he turned into a voracious donkey overnight. After she’d explained the scam to him, pretending to keep it secret so I wouldn’t be implicated-she protects me from all forms of reality, especially male-you couldn’t have stopped him.” She has become quite vigorous, even to the point of raising her body from the chaise. “And this is the point, d’you see? If he’d just heated up a couple of cheap Burmese sapphires now and then and taken a modest profit, the Japs would have accepted the scam as part of the game. But he had to do his American think-big thing and go to that godforsaken village in Tanzania and buy up all their sapphire junk by the kilo. Literally.”
I wait and wait, but she doesn’t continue. She has fallen into some kind of reverie. I say, “I don’t understand.”
The words take about two minutes to penetrate, then she says, languidly, “Why not? To understand all you need are two things: sixteen hundred degrees Centigrade, and beryllium.”
“You paid off the Japanese labs that check gems for the local industry?”
She waves a hand. “Nothing so sophisticated. Thais don’t know how to bribe Japanese laboratories, assuming such a thing is possible. No, you see, the labs themselves weren’t up to speed. They simply didn’t know, or didn’t believe, Thais could be so smart, so devious, and so humble looking at the same time. And apparently their tests for beryllium were very crude and unreliable. And what’s more, we never used the word padparadscha on any of the invoices-they were simply described as sapphires. The Japs thought they were being clever because they knew these gems were really the hyper-valuable padparadscha and we did not. They thought they were fooling us-just as we intended. They’re terrible racists, you see; they haven’t changed since Nanking. No way they were going to think our decadent brown people would outsmart them. We never sold the product at the market price-thirty thousand dollars a carat-but about twenty-five percent cheaper. We let them think they were getting a bargain from a genuine Thai padparadscha mine, and Thai pads, when you can get them, are among the best in the world. It was only when the Japanese tried selling their Thai padparadschas-which were actually enhanced low-quality African sapphires-to America, where the labs were more up to speed, that they realized what Kongrao had done. And since there was no evidence of misrepresentation, there was nothing they could do. But it destroyed more than fifty percent of their gem merchants. You had bankruptcies from Nagasaki to Sapporo.” She rubs her jaw. “I suppose one shouldn’t laugh.”
“But you killed Frank Charles. I mean, you set him up as a mascot knowing the Japanese would kill him sooner or later?”
“Detective, you are a terrible naïf, and this leads you to misjudge human character. You are still thinking of Frank as a victim, just because he got bumped off. Actually, it was the opposite. When farang get greedy, they have no restraint. Once he knew how the whole scam worked, he became a fanatic. Ah Ting begged him to calm down, he was selling too much, upsetting the balance. He not only ignored her, he mastered the technique himself. He started heating the gems up to sixteen hundred degrees Centigrade and adding the beryllium-he became very good at it, approached the whole process much more methodically than any of our people. He even invested in proper electric kilns and a cooking recipe that enabled him to control the timing down to the microsecond. You see, Detective, the bottom line about Frank Charles, the source of his being, you might say, was greed. A nice enough guy, and he really did want to make a halfway decent film at least once in his life, but he was thwarted by his own greed all the way. Frank Charles was just greedy, greedy, greedy. That’s why he got so fat, and why he had to have ten naked girls in his Jacuzzi on his sixtieth birthday-no fancy psychological component, just old-fashioned greed and the American predatory spirit.”