The Godfather of Kathmandu (38 page)

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:

I decide to take a flyer and show up in a cop car at the front entrance to Moi’s house on the river.

It’s quite a different prospect from this side. You could say the estate is almost conventional, with its long curved drive lined with tropical plants. Orchids of every shade grow like parasites in coconut husks hanging from ficus and palm trees. Scarlet poinsettias, amaryllis, and ivy poke and drape for most of the drive, with a stand of bamboo next to a large pool surrounded by tropical succulents that look as though they could bite your hand off. A large anthurium bush owns slim golden phalli that emerge from bracts exactly the same color as the backside of a red-assed baboon, and just as obscene. Finally, at drive’s end, a porch like a Thai temple, and, of course, the shrine in the northwest corner of the grounds garlanded with lotus. Someone has already made an offering of rice, oranges, and bananas to the household gods. I press the electric bell three aggressive times, because I intend to crash, whatever mood she is in. The maid answers, sees the marked police car behind me, and beckons me inside. She is immaculate as ever in her black-and-white servant’s livery, tall and elegant with her long sad moon face soaring over the frilly collar. I think it a little odd, the way she directs me across the polished teak floor of the central part of the house, and onto the terrace at back, without first alerting Moi. I can hear the Doctor yelling long before I see her. Why would the maid want me to see her mistress in the midst of one of her early-morning tantrums? Perhaps it is a statement about who is in control. To my surprise, her preferred language of scolding is not her native Teochew, nor even Thai, but finishing-school English.

“And you bloody spilled cocoa on my favorite cheungsam,” Moi is howling in a slightly hysterical voice, before she sees me. “How much more of my life are you going to destroy before you kill
me
, too?”

I turn instantly to catch the expression on the maid’s face: blank. Moi is sitting up on one of her chaise longues, braless in a large black cotton
T-shirt which would be easily big enough to cover her loins if she cared. Even when she sees me she makes no effort, but sits there in a sulk for a moment, her vagina on general view, before she hitches the T-shirt over it with a grimace. “What the hell is
he
doing here?”

For answer the maid returns with a silver tray containing what I suppose is the Doctor’s breakfast: a collection of pills of various dimensions and colors, and a tiny medicine bottle with a pipette. The pipette, it seems, is the star of the show, for Moi carefully squeezes the rubber bulb, inserts it into the bottle, lets the rubber bulb expand, then examines the contents of the glass tube. Satisfied, she throws her head back, empties the clear liquid into her mouth, then tucks into the rest of the pills. Whatever was in the pipette, it works pretty quickly. Moi’s personality alters in minutes, and now she is standing and brushing the black T-shirt down over her body until it reaches the middle of her thighs, the miracle of elegance somehow retrieved. She holds out a hand for me to kiss; “What a wonderful surprise,” she says in a glacial tone. “Won’t you please sit down?”

I sit near the guardrail at the edge of the balcony, next to the river. It is quite gay at this moment, with tugs pulling a big Korean container ship into midstream, a couple of snakehead boats with their great bus engines on davits at the stern roaring past, a posse of women wearing straw hats each in her own individual sampan, hauling vegetables, fish, fruit, and whatever else they can sell. I feel a little strange to see a bunch of kids from the shantytown naked, screaming, and diving off Moi’s jetty into the river with the fanatical repetition only the young can maintain. Moi is blinking in the merciless light. Suddenly urbane all over again, she refuses to ask me what I want. I say, “I went to see your ex-husband Johnny Ng in Hong Kong.”

I kept my eyes on the maid as I spoke the name, hoping that I would succeed in making her pause while she tidied up; not a chance. Moi, on the other hand, has clamped a hand over her mouth. When she removes it I cannot read her expression, not because there isn’t one, but because it is too complex to interpret. Amusement? Excitement? Puerile curiosity? Anger? All of those, together with a certain delicious anticipation. I see no sign of fear. “Would you like some cocoa?”

“No, thanks, not this time.”

She moves toward me, I assume to take up her favorite chaise next to the guardrail. Before doing so, she brushes by me and—to my
astonishment—caresses my face with one hand. “You’re so cute. So dangerously innocent, like Lord Jim. You visited Johnny and managed to stay in one piece? I’m surprised he didn’t have you for dim sum. What did he tell you? If he talked it must have been because he was bored. Boredom is his only real weakness. I do hope he prefaced everything with the confession that he’s Kongrao? That we own him all the way down to his DNA?” I’m shocked at her use of the word
kongrao;
but, of course, technically you could argue that the phrase might have an innocent meaning here; after all, Moi did marry him.

“He didn’t need to. The way he left out everything that could implicate ‘your thing’ made it all too obvious. But he did tell me in a few hours what I would have discovered anyway in a week or so.”

She sits down on the chaise, stretches her legs and crosses them, turns languid. “And what might that have been?”

I take out a gem trader’s magazine for the month of March 2007, open it to the page which bears the news that the famous Hollywood director Frank Charles confessed himself deeply moved to accept the position of honorary ambassador to the Thai guild of gem traders, then stand up to lay it on her black lap. She takes it in with one glance, sighs, chucks it on the floor, and stares expectantly at me.

I go back to sit on my rattan chair, lean forward toward her, and ask in a slightly plaintive voice, “Why, Mimi? He was your good friend, for Buddha’s sake.”

She looks at me in blank incomprehension, gasps, turns to the maid, and seems to say in her mother tongue,
Did you hear what this jerk just said?
Or words to that effect. Now even the maid is looking at me as if I have a serious learning disability. Indeed, Moi lets out a long, slow whoop. “Are you sure you don’t want some enhanced cocoa? I think you’re going to need something, Detective.”

In a voice which is suddenly regal, she dismisses the maid, who quickly leaves the terrace. “As a chemist, allow me to ask one little question. The pathologist, whoever it was, they made a list of all the chemicals found on and in his body?” I nod. “And was one of those substances beryllium?” I nod again. “Under his fingernails, perhaps?” I let her have another nod. “Then quite frankly, Detective, I could rest my case right there. Out of respect for your terrifying mother, however, I will tell you more.”

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
farang
land, 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.”