“He thinks it comes from you?”
“Of course he does. He thinks I’m inventing a third party to protect him from so I can keep squeezing. He thinks he’s going to have to fork out a few million every year. He thinks I’m a low-rent crook who’ll just keep sucking his blood forever.” I refrain from comment. “That’s what happens when the lines start to get blurred. Honor and respect are the first casualties.”
“What d’you want to do?”
“It’s what I have to do. We’re going to see him now. We’re going down on our knees. We’re acknowledging that the situation has swung in his favor. We are even reducing our fee.” Pointing at the photograph: “We have to convince him this isn’t us.”
In back of the battered old patrol car I watch Vikorn move the assemblage point of his mind to a position of total humility. The receptionist at the bank was charmed enough on our first visit; now she’s overwhelmed at the Buddhist quality of this senior cop: so self-effacing yet at the same time firmly professional. We are whisked up to Tanakan’s suite at lightning speed by a couple of heavily built guards. As before, we wait in a conference room. This time it is the perfect secretary, not the man himself, who arrives to call us into his office. There is no offer of tea, coffee, or soft drinks, and she doesn’t look at me. Tanakan does not bother to stand up when we enter, and the secretary closes the door behind us without a word. Vikorn sinks to his knees on the carpet, at the same time showing a high wai, and I have to do the same. This does have the effect of warming the atmosphere, from maybe minus five to zero.
“Khun Tanakan,” Vikorn says, “I am aware of what Khun Tanakan must be thinking, but it is not so.” Vikorn is careful to keep his hands together at his forehead. “Your humble servant is an honest trader.”
Tanakan glowers, somewhat theatrically in my view. “I wish I could believe the Colonel. What began as an honest negotiation between men of honor seems to have — ”
“Not at my instigation, Khun Tanakan. Would Khun Tanakan take it as evidence of my sincerity that I am prepared to lower the value of the vase?”
Tanakan stands up and emerges from behind his desk.
“From now on the vase has no value, Vikorn. From now on if I hear anything in relation to the vase, I will press a certain autodial number on my cell phone. A cell phone belonging to the owner of a motorcycle and his armed assistant will ring somewhere in the city. I am sure the Colonel understands. Certainly one always prefers to play the game and avoid loss of life. When someone starts to break the rules, however, one must take one’s chances. After all, I have a position to defend, and I thought it was implicit in our discussions that you were my principal defender. You have failed, Colonel. You’re not doing your job, man.”
Vikorn has turned gray. However, he masters himself, bows his head, stands, and all of a sudden we are on our feet at the door. Tanakan calls us back for a moment, however. He reaches into his drawer to take something out and chuck it across his desk at Vikorn. It is an elephant-hair bracelet. “It came with that abominable picture,” he snaps, then turns his back to look out of the window.
In back of the car on the way to the station, Vikorn delivers one of his homilies:
“You see what happens when the work of professionals is screwed up by amateurs? Tanakan knew he’d been caught with his knickers around his ankles and was ready to cough up like a pro so long as the negotiations were courteous, discreet, and professional and the price was reasonable. Now some barbaric clown has poisoned the well. I want you to find him and give me the address. You don’t have to be there when the men make the visit, understand?”
He raises haggard eyes. I gulp and nod.
Back at my desk, the cell phone rings.
“You watched the video?”
“Yes.”
“So now you know what to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can adjust the technique according to the personality of the subject. Kowlovski was very stupid. I think your subjects will be more fun.”
I’m not sure I’m really understanding. If I am, I don’t want to. “What subjects?”
“The ones I have identified with the bracelets.”
My jaw drops. “How can I interrogate them? One is a senior banker, one is an eminent lawyer, the other is a bum, and all of them have perfect alibis.”
“No, they don’t.”
“But they weren’t even in the country. They weren’t even in the same country as one another. One was in the U.S., one was in Angkor Wat, and the other was in Malaysia.”
“Isn’t that a coincidence?”
“Well, it may look suspect, but it does prove that none of them were directly involved in the” —I grope for the right word —“killing.”
“My sister said there were meetings. You know, as in major shareholders.”
“How did she know?”
“She was one of them.”
The revelation causes quite a jolt. “She attended business meetings at which her body and her death were the proposed profit center? I’m going to need evidence.”
“Confessions are always the best evidence. Is that not so?”
“You can’t get confessions like that out of free men.”
“Free men? I’m working on it.” He closes the phone.
With cynical intent to deceive I call Vikorn directly on his cell phone. “I’ve been looking into it. I’m going to raid Baker and Smith. I think one of them must be behind this elephant crap.”
“Why bother with a raid? I’ll send a motorbike.”
“No, Colonel, I’m not sure it’s one of them. I’m just sure I can find out something from them.”
“Have it your way. But I want the one who sent that photograph strung up by the balls and presented to Tanakan in a nice neat velvet package.”
“I know.”
“I think our banker might prefer a living body he can have some fun with.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
I balance my chair on its back legs, put my feet on my desk, and make a cathedral of my hands. It never works, but it does make me feel like Philip Marlowe. I am frowning. The same three suspects: Dan Baker, Tom Smith, Khun Tanakan. But suspected of what, exactly? I am not even sure if Damrong’s contract was illegal in Thailand. I am not even sure there was a contract. Perhaps no crime was committed at all, beyond manslaughter by Kowlovski? It was a crime against the heart, though—a crime against humanity, you might say—which led to others: Nok, whose butchered innocence rests heavy on my heart; the otherworldly Pi-Oon and his flamboyant lover. This surely is the monk’s message. I agree, but who to scare first, Baker or Smith? Tanakan will have to be left alone for the time being since he’s under Vikorn’s protection; I’m not at all sure how to finesse that. I guess even Marlowe didn’t get himself into these kinds of jams.
On the face of it, Baker would be the obvious first choice. A weak character, accustomed to doing deals with cops, probably incapable of loyalty. I have more or less decided on him, then change my mind. The trouble with Baker is that he doesn’t fit and has started to puzzle me. Instead of Chinese boxes, in this case we have Chinese pyramids, all fitting one inside the other. Tanakan and Tom Smith are part of an elite Great Pyramid of international players. Smith is near the bottom and Tanakan is near the top, but it’s the same exclusive global pyramid. Dan Baker, the small-time hustler, belongs to a quite different low-rent pyramid, where he subsists somewhere near the bottom.
Puzzling it through: something about Smith the lawyer attracts me—that modern British hysteria just below the surface, despite his brilliant mind and worldly wisdom. The man who lost his head more than once in a jealous frenzy may lose it again and again. I think about busting him, then decide to go to his office on a fishing expedition instead. Then I suffer from what one of my uncles calls “a touch of the seconds.”
The problem is not normally featured in police thrillers, but it goes like this: How exactly does a low-ranking, humble, third-world cop go about browbeating a smarter, more powerful, better-educated, and, most daunting of all, better-connected, senior, respected lawyer? Yes, it’s called a sense of inferiority, but just because you feel like a victim doesn’t mean you’re not about to become one. I would like some concrete facts to confront him with, but when I think about his various cameo appearances, none of them adds up to much more than a mirage. Perhaps his fondness for brothels and prostitutes would count against him in a more hypocritical society, but, thanks to our natural openness, no one would doubt he was in the same boat as most other men who live here. I need something more, something that will at least give me more confidence, even if it isn’t a killer point. I sit immobilized by an apparently insurmountable reluctance and only slowly formulate a plan. It’s about six in the evening when I finally decide to call Lek over to my desk.
“Lek, do you keep a skirt in the office?”
Covering a smirk: “Of course not. Don’t you think I have enough to put up with?”
“So go home and change into your Saturday-night best. Tight T-shirt or sweater to flash the estrogen, very short skirt, rouge, mascara, earrings—the whole works. Be as provocative as you like, but not too vulgar. The Parthenon is up-market, after all.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go there asking for work again. This time look serious, and make sure they believe you. When you leave the premises, you will pass the doorman. Give him a scrap of paper with my name and cell phone number. Whisper, Anywhere, anytime, any price.”
I put my feet up on my desk again and wait.
31
“Chatuchak market, tomorrow, eleven-twenty, stall 398 in the northwest corner.” The caller, a young woman, hangs up immediately. I am thinking, Smart, very smart. Chatuchak, that vast, unfathomable labyrinth of covered market stalls, amounts to a city of open-air merchandisers, selling anything and everything from tropical fish, brightly colored birds, and exotic orchids—which rarely survive the journey home—to plastic pails, to offers of irresistible real estate opportunities on islands with dubious land titles—just about everything. You can even get your Toyota serviced while you’re browsing. Today is Friday, so it will be jam-packed. Hard to say, these days, who are in the majority, vacationing farang, trendy urbanites, middle-income Thais looking for genuine bargains, or the browse-only bunch who simply love markets. Anyway, I’m reduced to a shuffle-and-twist technique to get me through the narrow body-packed alleys that lead, finally, to stall 398 of section 57 in the northwest corner.
I don’t know why I’m intrigued that the produce on sale consists of orchids and tropical birds; something in the back of my mind links these two, but I cannot remember the scam just at the moment. Two young women, pretty in their aprons with large money-pockets, are calling out to passersby, with particular interest in well-to-do farang families with that wide-open look which comes with one’s first arrival in the exotic East. Now I remember the scam and smile. When the young women take no notice of me, I go to a cathedral-shaped cage which is the prison of a particularly vivid crimson and yellow parrot, lick an index finger, and start to stroke the crimson crown on its head. That gets their attention real quick. “I am Sonchai,” I say, before they have a chance to scold. At the same time I hold up my index finger, the end of which is now slightly crimson. The older of the two whisks me through to the back of the stall, which is shut off from the front by a tarpaulin curtain. The doorman, wearing spectacles, sits at a table in navy surplus shorts and flip-flops, no shirt. The brown bird he is holding firmly in his left hand looks somewhat like a macaw but owns streaming central tail feathers that make it ideal for this kind of exercise. I don’t know its name in English, but it’s very common, particularly in Isaan, where it is considered a pest. Actually the feathers are delicate shades consisting mostly of dark chocolate on cafe au lait; their somewhat monochrome beauty has no appeal to the vulgar, though, and like the Acropolis in its day, it needs plenty of help from paint to appeal to popular taste.
The doorman is clearly an expert. He uses a tiny artist’s brush and works from some authoritative tome with full-color plates. “It’s going to be a red-tailed tropic bird,” he says, looking down and reading. “ ‘Phaethon rubricauda.” “ He casts me a glance before continuing with the pink, orange, and black markings he is laying across the eyes and wings. Little by little he adds value with the concentration of a Picasso. ”This is what I used to do before I went to work for him.“ He gives me a quick, shattered look. ”Before I lost my innocence, you might say. I do it for free now, just to keep my hand in. This stall belongs to my sister. Those girls out front are her daughters.“ He manages an ironic smile. ”You could call it a family business handed down from one generation to the next. Frankly, it has always been the boys who make the best painters, with a couple of exceptions. My father was brilliant—he could turn a blackbird into a flamingo if he wanted to. I don’t even come close.“ Neither I nor the bird is convinced by his modesty. His masterful makeover has improved the creature’s self-esteem immeasurably. When he places it back in its cage, it prances and preens and cannot wait to impress the opposite sex with its irresistible new wardrobe. I say, ”What about the orchids?“