“It cost us more than a thousand baht for all of us to come here today,” she says, fixing my gaze. I fish out my wallet, hand over two thousand, cast my eye around the room (not a sign of blood or struggle), nod, wai, and take my leave. Outside I trudge around for a while, feeling bad. The apartment building is only one of dozens that have sprung up on land speculation, and they are all the same: long five-story structures composed of identical cells. Blink once, and it could be a concentration camp. Blink twice, and it could be anywhere in the third world. Blink three times, and it might be all our futures in this age of functional barbarism. I have to get out of here.
When I’m back at my desk, Vikorn calls. “Where have you been?”
“I’m investigating a murder.”
“Sonchai, I’m not asking this time, I’m ordering. Don’t go there. Let Kurakit deal with it. As it is, you’re lucky to be alive. I know you don’t give a shit about anything except your piety, but if you won’t keep your nose out of it for me, at least do it for Chanya and your unborn child. Tanakan will squash you like a bug and never give you a second thought. Do you want Kurakit investigating your murder? Where will that get you?”
I think of Nok’s father and want to say, Nirvana. But I don’t have the innocence or the guts. Instead I grunt, “Okay.”
In the circumstances, the company of a frustrated drug trafficker-cum—movie director feels like light entertainment. Yammy has just messaged me:
I’m at the Kimsee, drinking. Come join me.
The Kimsee is a Japanese restaurant on Sukhumvit, opposite the Emporium and under a Skytrain bridge. It looks as if it were carefully removed from somewhere quaint in Tokyo and reconstructed here in Bangkok under strict Japanese quality control. I’ve been there a couple of times, and apart from the Thai waitresses everything about the place strikes me as authentic Nippon, including the heavy-drinking salary-men who all have their own reserved bottles of best sake with their names printed on them, waiting on a high shelf.
Yammy’s is not waiting, though. It started out as a liter but has lost half its contents. As I sit down at the dark-stained wooden table, which perfectly matches the dark-stained wooden decor, Yammy beckons to one of the waitresses, who comes to pour some of the sake into a stone jar for heating. A few minutes later it comes back warm, and she pours a couple of shots into the tiny mugs. Yammy is halfway through his bento box, gloomily picking at yellow tofu with his wooden chopsticks.
“I don’t think I can go on any longer, Sonchai,” he says in that soft California accent. “This is it, I resign.”
“Okay,” I say, taking a slug of the sake. “I’ll speak to the boss.”
I cannot tell yet if this is the correct strategy. Maybe he’s too far down the line with his depression to be tricked out of it? He gives me a sly glance. “The third movie in the series is only one-half shot. You’ll have to find someone to take it over.”
“Right.”
Peering over his chopsticks: “You don’t care? The whole contract is at risk.”
“I realize that, Yammy, but you’re an artist—you’re temperamental. If the working environment is not right for you, you cannot work. Vikorn will have to understand that.”
“He won’t snuff me?”
“He might. But we already know you have no fear of death. After all, you were on death row for a while, and we practically had to beg you to leave jail.”
He manages a smirk and drops the pretense. “Look, I’ll finish this one and do the other ten, but after that—”
“Yammy, forget it. If you want to be difficult, Vikorn will dump you anyway. Maybe he’ll kill you, or maybe he’ll send you back to jail. Maybe you really do have that kind of integrity, but so what? The movies are going to get made, Yammy, if not by you then by someone else. I’m only afraid Vikorn will want me to take over the production.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He lays down his chopsticks to stare at me. “You? You don’t know scat about making a movie.”
“I agree. Just think how awful they’ll be if I make them. How is an amateur like me going to get a penis to slide into a vagina? It must take decades of practice.”
He maintains radio silence for about ten minutes—at least, that’s what it feels like. Finally, forcing me to stare back into those bottomless pits of morosity: “You have to babysit me, don’t you? That’s your job. So, we’re going to get drunk.” He tosses back some sake and nods at me to do the same. I’m still nursing guilt and mourning Nok and cannot think of a better thing to do. I’m not sure how many times we knock back the rice wine, but the sake bottle with Yammy’s name on it in elegant Japanese calligraphy is empty by the time we leave. Outside it is early evening. On the street, with the Skytrain rattling overhead and the static traffic chugging out airborne poison down below, the cooked-food stalls of the day, with their hundred varieties of sweet snacks, have been replaced by more serious stalls serving noodles and other dishes suitable for hungry commuters on their way home. Generally speaking, though, the landscape is more fluid than I remember. Yammy is in worse shape and can hardly stand. He claws at my left arm, which he is using to support himself. “You think it’s so easy to slide a penis into a vagina, when neither bit belongs to you? It’s not as easy as you think. You know who are the biggest prima donnas in the porn industry? The studs, my friend, the studs. One harsh word, and they droop.”
“But you have Jock?”
He grunts. “If not for him, I really would resign.”
That night Chanya surprises me. We are in bed together with my hand on the Lump, and I have just finished telling her how Nok died. I was expecting another fear reaction, followed by a demand that I listen to Vikorn and forget Nok. Chanya, though, is quiet for a long time. Finally she says, “Do what you have to do, Sonchai.”
“But what about you and the child?”
“We’ll have to take our chances. Too many people in Thailand are in denial. Keeping quiet in the Thai way doesn’t work anymore. Maybe one day a rich man will decide to rape and kill me, then pay off the police. Change has to start somewhere.”
“That’s not the way you talked last time Tanakan’s name came up.”
“I know. Now another woman is dead. Perhaps our Buddhism has made ordinary Thais too humble.”
“And the others too arrogant,” I mumble.
21
All serious crime starts with a plausible excuse: terrible childhood, fell down the stairs at a tender age, emerged from urban squalor, et cetera. The one I plan to commit needs nothing more than the murder of Nok, Pi-Oon, and Khun Kosana qua motivation; let’s not dwell on any residual outrage I may feel at the manner of Damrong’s demise. Nok, at least, did not conspire with her killer. I want Tanakan’s head, and to hell with Vikorn. I shall have to be a fox, though, if I am to survive. I have grudgingly to admit that it must have been precisely my connection with Vikorn that saved my life: if Tanakan bumped me off, the nature of his deal with the Colonel would alter in Vikorn’s favor; the Colonel would, of course, have shown no mercy.
I don’t have much of a plan as yet, which puts me in one hell of a mood. All I can think of is to grab the footman at the Parthenon on some pretext and do whatever is necessary to get him to talk, but if I do that, Tanakan will find out and snuff me. Anyway, that man does not fear death or jail; Tanakan holds his women, who are everything to him. He won’t talk unless he wants to. Sometimes I envy my Western counterparts the simplicity of their lives; presumably they have no care in the world beyond bringing perps to justice? A little schoolboyish, though, and lacking in moral challenge. I doubt you can burn much karma that way.
Still furious, I decide to take a walk around the block. I’m in no mood for social niceties when the Internet monk manages to get in my way as I’m crossing the road. I glare and pass on.
It is about eleven-thirty, the time when all good hawkers get cooking in readiness for the midday rush. They have set up their stalls opposite the police station especially for cops and staff, which earns them a special dispensation from arrest. You can tell what they are selling depending on the utensils: a simmering brass basin probably means a beef-based soup; a big enamel basin will have pigs’ legs simmering in it; a dark brown burnt-clay mortar with wooden pestle will produce wickedly hot somtan salad; a wok over charcoal means a fry-up, and so on.
I’ve cooled down a bit by the time I’m returning to the station, and I’m wondering if this might be the time to bring the monk in for questioning when he reappears out of the Internet cafe just as I am passing and bumps into me all over again. I turn on him with a sarcastic comment on my lips but freeze because he is standing with his hands in the air, palms facing me. The expression on his face is quizzical, almost amused. Mad monks are as common in Buddhism as in other monastic traditions. I think he must be really crazy, though, when he maneuvers to stay in front of me until I can find a way around him. I’m still thinking about him when I reach my desk and Lek joins me.
“D’you know what that Internet monk just did? He deliberately bumped into me and went like this.” I hold up both hands, palms toward Lek.
“He did the same thing to me yesterday.” I’ve noticed that Lek is less keen on the monk than he once was. “Maybe he is nuts. Did he show you his scar?”
“What scar?”
“I thought that was why he was holding his hands up. He has this scar on his wrist, like he once tried to commit suicide or something and maybe now he’s obsessing in some way.”
“But the bracelets?” I say.
“Maybe he’s giving bracelets to everyone he meets. Maybe there is no connection.”
“He didn’t give me one.”
Actually, I did see the scar but paid it no attention. We both shrug. Nobody wants to be the one to get a monk put away in a mental asylum. It’s a shame, though, for one so young to be in such decline. I dismiss him from my thoughts as I refocus on how to pot Tanakan, whether Vikorn likes it or not. I don’t think about the monk at all for the rest of the morning, and it’s only when Lek and I are sitting at a cooked-food stall for kong kob kiao, something to chew, that I think of him again. I am holding half a dozen fish balls on a stick, which I put down on the table.
“The scar,” I’s‘ay.
“What scar?”
“On the monk’s wrist.”
“What about it?”
“I want you to check the Internet cafe to see if he’s still there. I’m going back to the station. If he’s in there, ask him if he wouldn’t mind coming up to see me at his convenience. Be polite.”
Lek shrugs. Maybe I’m the one who will soon end up in the nuthouse.
I watch from the window next to my desk while Lek emerges from the Internet cafe, pushing his hair back with both hands. He appears at my desk a few minutes later, alone.
“Well?”
“He said he would be delighted to come and see you here in about an hour. He is going to the wat to meditate for a short time.”
I feel a twinge of annoyance, then let it pass. I remember that no one is more meticulous than a fraud. I’m recovered by the time he does show up, only to get irritated all over again at his self-conscious monk-at-the-shore-of-nirvana posing. I have to take myself in hand not to use an aggressive interrogation technique. Since he likes to wear monk’s robes, he obviously enjoys seeing others grovel.
“Phra—I’m sorry, I do not know your Sangha name.”
His sangfroid is imperturbable, I have to give him that. “It doesn’t matter. From the look on your face, I suppose you believe I do not have a Sangha name. Is that not so?”
Irritated all over again, I ask, “How many precepts do you follow?”
“What a childish question, Detective. You know very well every monk must follow two hundred and twenty-seven precepts.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “foolish of me.” I am taken aback at the educated quality of his Thai. I expected a lost, unlettered young man from the poor north.
“I understand. You think that I have not been behaving like a monk, therefore I cannot be one. This is called clinging to fixed images or, more generally, ignorance. Do you always behave like a detective, Detective?”
The elegance of his answer startles me into playing a poor hand. “For a monk you spend an awful lot of time in an Internet cafe. Are you a modernist Buddhist?”
A smile—not quite patronizing, but close. “Of course not. Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. Ancient questions begin to torment us all over again: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? But without wisdom, these questions turn toxic. Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age. This is the connection between modernism and Buddhism. In other words, there isn’t one unless you posit the latter as a cure for the former.” A sudden charming smile: “On the other hand, it’s convenient to download Buddhist texts without having to spend hours searching for them in a library. Until recently I’d had no idea how limited Theravada is. If I were to ordain today, I think I would do so in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives.”
