I’m tired of being mocked for my naïveté, so I take a long while to think the whole case through. After five minutes I’m still shaking my head. “But the way he was killed, Mimi-the way he died?”
She takes a cool toke from the cheroot and stubs it out. “Have you any idea how anal-retentive Japanese jewelers are? They are like brilliant insects working at the microscopic level all their lives, shaving off a micron here, a micron there, dominating their world at a level of detail designed to induce madness. No wonder they are all men. The passion to control is off the human scale. Imagine such a man consumed by hatred and the lust for revenge?”
I blink rapidly. “But whoever the perp was, he would have needed a copy of the film, and would have needed to know that the film had not been released, that no one of importance knew about it-”
I stop, because Moi has given a single, short glance toward the interior of the house where the maid has retreated. Obviously, she will not say another word of relevance to the case. I guess she doesn’t need to. Nevertheless, I try one last question. “It was in the interests of Kongrao to provide the sacrificial goat? To facilitate both the assassination and the perfect alibi-namely, that the victim killed himself on film? That’s why Witherspoon, who is Kongrao, was ordered to send me the movie? You are still trading with the Japanese? I suppose they had to be placated somehow?”
Moi doesn’t say anything. The interview is over. I have only one ace left: “Doctor, the toxicologist found tubocurarine chloride in his blood. How would a jeweler get hold of it? How would a jeweler even know he needed it? Frank Charles was paralyzed but fully conscious when Suzuki cut into his skull, removed it, and ate his brains.”
For an answer, the Doctor gives me that smile, the one where the corners of the lips crawl up the incisors.
I leave and walk through the house to the other side. There is no sign of the maid, but two of Moi’s outside guards are chatting to the cop who is waiting in the marked car I came in. They straighten up when they see me, but I can tell they’ve been smirking over some yarn with my driver. I get in the back of the car instead of sitting in front the way I normally do. “Where to?” he asks. I stare out the side window at Moi’s magnificent house, and at the river behind it, and at the kids from the shantytown yelling as they dive naked from the jetty. “It’s the strangest story you ever heard,” I tell the driver, still staring at the skinny kids. “Once upon a time a rich man arrived here from the West. It turned out he was lost in a dream in which he foretold the manner of his own death down to the last detail.”
“What? Where do you want to go?”
I think about that. “Silom,” I say. “That dingy three-star hotel opposite the Hindu temple.”
The temple is called Sri Mariamman, and there is the usual crowd of flower, incense, and amulet sellers hanging around outside it. I have no idea why there should be a Hindu temple in the middle of Bangkok, but it’s incredibly famous and holy, to judge by the amount of ochre and crimson powder people chuck all over its shrines, and the number of half-naked Indian holy men who arrive from places like Varanasi to worship here; generally they like to stay in the same three-star flophouse where Mr. Suzuki, the Japanese jeweler, committed suicide. Strictly speaking there is no forensic need to visit Suzuki’s former room; the evidence relating to his suicide will be in storage at a police station somewhere. But I feel a kind of animal need to be in the place where the little Japanese man-according to one of the newspaper reports he was just five foot two-worked himself up into a controlled orgasm of rage. I’m not entirely surprised that the superstitious Thai manager has kept the room vacant for the moment, and even placed some lotus buds to float in a brass bowl of water outside the door. He lets me in without question once I’ve flashed my ID. It is, indeed, a very small room, renting for only five hundred baht per night. The tiny window, no doubt perfectly clean on the inside, is dark with city pollution. Suzuki moved here from the five-star hotel he was staying in with the trade delegation, after his colleagues all went home. Did they appoint him as assassin? Did they know what he intended? Surely he must have needed help?
Against all logic, I prefer to think of the little guy working on his own. I don’t want to believe he used a pack of yakuza thugs to carry out his plan, although police reports suggest there were a few accompanying the delegation as bodyguards. I think he somehow maneuvered Frank Charles into his room in the flophouse on Soi 4/4 all on his own through sheer force of personality; how he stuck the lumbering giant with a syringe full of tubocurarine chloride is more of a challenge than my imagination can handle, however. Once he had paralyzed the American with his venom, did he use the room’s DVD player so that he could check he was following Frank Charles’s own instructions for his gaudy “suicide,” or had he watched the movie so many times he retained perfect recall? He would have needed a rotary saw, of course, but for a master jeweler that would not have been a problem.
Suzuki, more than anyone, had been destroyed by Frank Charles and Kongrao’s scam-utterly wiped out, according to reports, and left with an impossible pile of debts. It seems he had seen the padparadscha trade as his chance for jewelers’ stardom and wagered all his savings, even mortgaged his business, in order to buy the brilliantly colored sapphires that turned out to be worth only a tiny fraction of what he paid for them. A man of honor and a passionate practitioner of the Japanese sport of kendo, I think he was also a dark introvert who told nobody what he intended to do; rather, he expected that the nobility of his last act would redeem him posthumously in the eyes of his society. I think of him working on Frank Charles’s drugged body plopped all over that narrow bed on Soi 4/4, carefully marking out on the American’s cranium where he had to cut in accordance with the movie. I imagine the demon of vengeance taking full possession of the little man’s disciplined soul. He ate the brains right out of the skull, raw like sushi. Apparently, a few hours after he killed Frank Charles he returned here to disembowel himself while sitting on the floor cross-legged facing the dirty window.
When I find out from the station where Suzuki’s personal effects are being held, I go over to the storage depot and sign a form. I wait in a dusty office while a clerk brings me an unusually long metal box, which she opens in front of me. According to the rules I am supposed to put on a pair of plastic gloves; I do so in order to pick up the heavy object in one corner of the box. It is much smaller than I imagined, far smaller than the kind of rotary saws that surgeons use, but I guess it is just as powerful, if not more so. In any event, the disk is easily big enough to cut through a quarter inch of human bone, and, of course, being a tool of the jewelry trade, the disk’s edge is enhanced with industrial diamonds. It is also encrusted with blood. And then there is the other kind of disk, a DVD, black and wordless on the title side; I pick it up to examine it, turning it in the light so I can see where the band of data has been burned into the plastic, then replace it. The other object of interest-and the reason why the box needed to be so long-is a samurai sword; its blade, still bloodstained, is wrapped in a clear plastic sheath. I’m not an expert, but I would judge from the damascene pattern and the perfect heft that it must be of the highest quality.
I am afraid there is not much to do but sigh. I could, of course, have the bloodstains on the saw tested to see if the blood belonged to Frank Charles, but I don’t really have the time. Tietsin is dropping the smack tomorrow. And anyway, who cares? As far as the world is concerned, two unrelated suicides, one a diminutive Japanese jeweler, the other a fantastically outsized American movie director, happened to occur within hours of each other on the same night in Bangkok. What else is new? And that’s just the way Kongrao and the Japanese gem traders want it left. But I had to solve the case, didn’t I?