“But he will?”
She lets the moment hang, then changes tack. “So what is this all about? I thought it was a murder investigation? So, the case is solved. You know who did it, because I told you.”
I look away down the beach. “I suppose it’s because you’re a professional you guessed I’m married?” She doesn’t answer.
I’m trying to puzzle it out, sending all the conflicting information into the great reservoir of consciousness the Buddhist theorists talk about.
It works. After a few minutes I think I have it. “You go to temple a lot?”
“Yes.”
“You’re devout?”
“I’m a whore.”
“But you take the Dharma seriously?” She doesn’t answer. “You would do anything, including screw me for free, so as not to have my death burdening your karma? But it is unusual for anyone to think like that-unless there are other deaths weighing on your conscience. Of course, if you were dragged into the organ-trafficking business, somehow, against your will perhaps…”
She’s quiet for a long while. She seems depressed. “Please leave Phuket tonight.” She stands and walks away.
I sit there for a few minutes, thinking, then give a good long sigh. I haul myself up from the chair and make my way to the main street. When I see a cab, I hail him and, standing in the road feeling a little theatrical, tell him in a loud voice to get me to the airport immediately. When we’re out of the main street, though, I change my mind. “Take me up to Golden Goose temple,” I tell him.
“I can’t take you all the way up. You have to climb the last half mile.”
“I know.”
It seems like a long shot, but really it isn’t. Of course, Buddhism is a science of the mind, so in theory it doesn’t matter where you worship. It doesn’t matter if you worship at all, so long as you follow the path. But I know sixty million Buddhists who don’t think that way. Not a believer, from lowly farmwives to aristocrats, who doesn’t have their favorite power center, that special temple that has always brought them luck, that particular monk who seems more enlightened than the rest.
The Golden Goose mountain is one of those places that have probably been sacred to humans for as long as there have been humans. I bet before Buddhism it was the center of an animist cult, and before that they probably sacrificed people up there. It’s just such a perfect takeoff spot for the other side. And it happens to be held in respect by many of the ladies who work the night and need somewhere to go now and then to cleanse themselves.
The cab drops me at the end of the road, and I find the steps that lead up. It must be about one in the morning by now: the moon has completed more than half its transit. I’m tired, though, and the steps are steep. When I reach the doors of the temple, they are locked, but an old man is on guard, which is to say awake on a mat under an awning. I tell him I’m a former monk in need and give him a few hundred baht. He opens the gate and shows me a kuti, a monk’s shack on stilts, which is empty, probably because it’s the most decrepit they have. He says he’ll tell the abbot about me in the morning.
I fall asleep on the bamboo floor of the kuti and wake up before dawn to the sounds of monks moving around. I find the temple building itself and wait at the back until it is full of saffron-robed men sitting on their ankles, like me. Soon we are all roaring out the “Homage to the Buddha” as if it’s the first day on earth. For an instant I’m young, innocent, and high. When the monks have all gone on their alms rounds, I ask to see the abbot. When I describe Om, he knows who I’m talking about.
“She’s the real thing,” he tells me. “She comes here whenever she can and meditates. I try to persuade her to become a maichi, a nun, but she says she is her family’s only breadwinner, she can’t just leave them to starve. I tell you, that woman has the Buddha in her more than most of my monks.”
“Does she talk to you?”
“About herself and her troubles? No, not at all. I have to drag it out of her. Even then she never complains. Like I tell you, she’s the real thing.”
I ask him about a certain day or night last month. He doesn’t want to answer at first, but eventually he agrees that he has seen her upset once or twice. “Life isn’t easy for anyone, especially the spiritually awakened.”
To keep the conversation going, I ask him about farang. His temple has become world famous and is mentioned in all the guidebooks. He rolls his eyes. “I never know where to start. They’re so programmed by materialism, they think they want enlightenment, when all they’re really looking for is a new kind of gratification, a thrill they can’t get from a pill or a bottle or a video game. When I try to explain that strong emotion is inherently unreliable and isn’t what the Buddha meant when he referred to the heart, they think I’m being cruel. Thai monks may not be what they were, but they still have the perspective. For farang I despair. Hardly a one of them I meet who has a hope of being reborn into the human form. I see sheep and dogs of the future in designer T-shirts climbing up and down this mountain, getting in and out of the tourist buses.”
“They’re stuck in Aristotelian logic: ‘A cannot be not-A.’ ”
“Tell me about it! The discovery of nirvana is the psychological equivalent of the invention of zero but vastly more important. Think of where mathematics was before zero, and you have the level of mental development of the West: good/bad, right/left, profit/loss, heaven/hell, us/them, me/you. It’s like counting with Roman numerals.”
I tell him about my time in a monastery a long time ago, when I was in my teens. My abbot was one of the most respected, and strict, in Thailand.
He shakes his head. “If I were to behave like that today, no monk would ordain with me. Everyone has gone soft. Can you believe there are abbots who spend fortunes on air-conditioning for the kutis, so the poor pampered little things can stay cool?”
We continue chatting for more than an hour. When I’m about to leave, his features change. A lifetime of ruthless discipline is suddenly written in those wrinkles-he has dropped the kind-uncle mask without a second thought.
“If you’re not careful, she’ll destroy you.”
“Who?”
“Don’t play games, you know who I mean. To love a woman for her body is no big deal-a man can get over it. But to secretly love a spirit as strong as that and think you can somehow own it-that’s looking for serious trouble.”
“But she’s on the game,” I blurt, and instantly regret it. I cannot stand his gaze and look away.
“Who isn’t? Under materialism everyone is a whore. Go home to your wife.”
“How d’you know I’m married?”
“If you weren’t married, you wouldn’t feel so tortured, would you?”
I walk back down the stone stairs. A delivery van has just unloaded some provisions. The driver agrees to take me back to the main road for fifty baht. Halfway down the hill we turn into a rest area to let a tourist bus pass. I look up at the windows, and for a brief moment I see dogs and sheep staring out. It’s quite a detailed vision, very surreal. That abbot must be well on the way to Buddhahood.
At the bottom of the hill I wave down a cab and tell him to take me to the airport. When we reach a fork, though, I tell him to stop for a moment while I think about the case. Why, exactly, did I come to Phuket this time? Because the Colonel insisted that there was something I was missing. I’m not going to even try to figure out how he might know more than me, but I feel bad about returning to Bangkok with nothing much to report. So I tell the driver to take me to Vulture Peak again.
At the same time I’m wrestling with a nagging thought hovering just at the border of consciousness. It goes like this: I knew about the heliport with its giant H on that mound about two hundred yards from the house without thinking about it. That’s how I realized there had to be a chopper service from the airport. But when I reflect, I don’t understand how I knew about the heliport. So, I’m trying to think it through: I was in the registry with Lek and the clerk, examining the plans of the house, which are attached to the land registration, and I picked up on the fact that there is a tiny heliport not far away. What’s wrong with that? Well, the plan was supposed to be only of the house and grounds, and yet it shows a heliport on common land quite a distance from the house’s perimeter.