Bangkok Haunts (8 page)

I shrug. “You admitted to feelings of extreme bitterness, to being a kind of emotional slave. The condition of psychological slavery is invariably a precursor to homicidal thoughts. In your fantasies, from time to time, how did you kill her?” He stares, speechless. “I fear my interrogation technique is not quite up to Western standards, Mr. Baker. You must forgive me. You know how we Thai cops are, virtually no training in the finer points of forensic investigation, nothing but our crude third-world intuition to go by—and what little we’ve been able to glean of human nature in our folksy way. You did dream of killing her from time to time, didn’t you?”
I seem to have broken through to another, more interesting Baker when he says, “She was murdered? Yeah, okay. Guilty of homicidal thoughts against her, so long as you include half the Johns in Bangkok in that category.”
Then all of a sudden another fragment takes over; there is nothing to forewarn us of the flash storm. “Dead? Goddamn it, you people just make me want to puke. You come here to tell a man his ex-wife is dead, and that’s it, you just say it like that, like a weather report, like it’s just a fact like any other.” He is wild-eyed and challenging me with outrage. Perhaps in a newcomer it would have been a convincing response, but this man has been here nearly five years. Finally he makes a show of controlling himself. “Are you going to tell me how she died?”
“First tell me how surprised you are,” I say. Just the quirky, dumb question you’d expect from someone like me, right? Hard to answer though.
“How surprised? What kind of question is that?” He studies me for a moment. “Maybe I need a lawyer.”
I look around the room. “By all means. They’re expensive, though, and it can be quite difficult to find one who, let us say, has your interests at heart. You could spend a long time in jail waiting and then find you have to answer my questions anyway. Up to you.”
He thinks about this and says, “I am personally shocked that she is dead, but no one who knew her would be surprised that she met an early end.”
“Good,” I say, “now we’re getting somewhere. What sort of early death would you have envisioned for your ex-wife? Give us the whole story. Take your time.”
A pause, a groan, then what looks like an honest response: “Nothing you can’t guess. Really.”
I let a couple of beats pass while he wrestles with his heart. “When did you last see her?”
“A couple months ago.” He raises his eyes to look into mine. “Of course I’m not going to demand a lawyer. For what? You don’t have a system of justice—you have a system of extortion. This is a kleptocracy. Everyone who stays here long enough finds that out.” I raise my eyes in a question. “So it would give me some comfort if you would disregard some minor infractions, in the interests of bringing her killer to justice.” There is no self-consciousness now, no posturing; he’s looking for a deal.
“I can’t promise because I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can be very lenient for the right person though.”
“How much d’you want?”
“I’m not talking about money. I want information. Everything you know about her life here.”
Shocked: “You don’t want money?” He sighs and purses his lips.
After they let me out of the penitentiary, I came over here looking for her. I found her working in a bar in Soi Cowboy, run by a cop and his mother. She was quite pleased to see me but explained that our relationship was going to be a little different over here. It was business only. I started to do porn shots of her, mostly soft stuff for some American magazines and the Net. Sometimes it was hard porn —it’s a specialist niche these days, anonymous clients put in special requests for a particular girl on the webpage. If the request wasn’t too complicated — you know, a blow job or something—I would supply the cock, using a delayed action timer on the camera. That’s what we met for. Sometimes I would have the business connection, and sometimes it would come from her. She liked to use me as stud and cameraman because we worked well together. We didn’t make a lot that way, but it sure helped supplement my income.“ He waves a hand at the apartment to indicate the extreme simplicity of his life.
“Webpage?”
A shake of the head. “You won’t find it. We would change it from week to week. Punters these days know how to follow the trail, download, and move on. Then the webpage ceases to exist. Some have a twenty-four-hour life cycle.” A shrug.
“This was only a sideline for both of you?”
“Sure. She got eighty percent of the dough, but it still wasn’t exactly big bucks. We were both working.” Looking out the window: “She wasn’t the type to stay anywhere for long. I gave up asking her where she was working. She generally liked to move upward though. She said something about a very upmarket men’s club, somewhere off Sukhumvit in a side soi, but like I say, she never stayed anywhere long. She despised that downmarket bar run by the cop and his mother. She had fun seducing the cop and watching him grovel for the right to lick her cunt—she was hilarious when she was on the rice whiskey. She would give these brilliant imitations of a jerk in love—apparently this cop fell for her real hard.” Turning his face to me with a frank, humble smile: “Just like me in the beginning.”
Now my head is spinning, blood has rushed to my face, and Lek is wondering why. Perhaps Dan Baker already knows about my affair with Damrong and is needling me, but I doubt it. That would be counterproductive from his point of view. I think he told it straight.
“That’ll do for now,” I tell him in a tight voice. “I’m keeping your passport for the time being.” I’m looking out the window, not able to face him all of a sudden. “I’ll issue an official receipt when I get back to the station and have a cop bring it around to you tomorrow.”
I give the room a final glance, then remember I’ve not yet visited the bathroom. He doesn’t seem too keen that I should do so; I’m following the line of his discomfort all the way into the cubicle. Jammed into a small space next to the toilet is a tall, cheap-looking set of drawers in a free-standing frame. I open them one by one, aware that he has come to stand in the doorway. Each drawer is full of photographic equipment of what looks like the highest quality. The main object is a sleek, professional-quality Sony movie camera. When I turn to him, a tic flutters under his left eye, and sweat has broken out on his forehead.
“You keep this stuff in the bathroom?”
“Where else? You can see how much space I have.”
“Don’t leave Bangkok until I say you can, Mr. Baker,” I tell him at the door. Now I feel a little impatient with Lek, who suddenly points at Baker’s left wrist and asks, “Who gave you that bracelet, Mr. Baker? It’s elephant hair, isn’t it?” A fine burnished virility aid, Baker looks at it curiously, as if he hasn’t thought about it in a while.
“A monk gave it to me a few days ago when I was walking down Sukhumvit. He said it would bring me luck. He wouldn’t take any money for it, so I figured he meant what he said.” He is as bewildered by Lek’s wayward mind as I am. At the door I ask the question I’ve been saving for last: “Who was the tall well-dressed Englishman who came to see you this afternoon, Mr. Baker?”
I was hoping for some telltale panic reaction to the question, but instead he smiles ironically and says, “A lawyer. He’s helping me with an immigration problem.”
When we reach the ground floor, I walk casually over to where the guards are playing checkers. They look as if they’ve not moved for a while—a week at least—but surprise me with a grin and a nod. Without a word the one I bribed takes us around to the back of the building and points up to something on the fifth floor. “That’s Baker’s window,” he explains. Hanging from the window by a rope: a shiny black laptop. “He hung it there at about the time you knocked on his door,” the guard explains.
Lek and I look up at the suspended laptop and scratch our heads. “Do you want to hire a ladder?” the guard asks. “Better hurry—he’s sure to take it in again now he thinks you’re gone.”
I negotiate a price to hire both a ladder and a guard with scissors and leave Lek to supervise the operation while I return to Baker’s apartment. He is shocked to see me again and cannot disguise the foxy look on his face. I pretend a renewed fascination with the photographic equipment in his bathroom, which keeps his nerves on edge for a good ten minutes, then politely take my leave.
Downstairs Lek is hugging the laptop, beaming. “That was so exciting. I was sure Baker was going to catch the guard at the top of the ladder and kick the ladder away.” Lek gives an elegant demonstration of kicking the ladder, apparently while wearing high heels. I give the guard my cell phone number and tell him to keep an eye on the window and call me when there’s some reaction from Baker. We’re in the back of the cab, halfway to the station, when my phone rings. “He went totally crazy. First he opened the window to pull the rope and saw that the rope had been cut. He stuck his body halfway out the window and seemed to go haywire. Next thing he’s down on the ground, below his window, scrabbling around in the dark, as if the thing fell down. Then he saw me looking at him and guessed what happened, and he looked like he’d seen a ghost. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone go like that. He crouched down against a wall with his head between his hands. I don’t know if he was crying or not, but he was very upset.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back in his apartment.”
Half an hour later he calls again. “That Englishman came, the same as before. He’s with him now.”
“Describe him again.”
“Tall, very fit-looking farang, dressed in smart business suit, striped, stiff white collar, and flashy silk tie. Good-looking like a film star.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“Sure. I asked him in Thai where he was going. He said to Baker’s apartment.”
“How was his Thai?”
“Good, with a thick English accent.”
I drop Lek off at his apartment building and take the cab home. As soon as I get in, I open the laptop. Judging by the lights below the keyboard, there is enough battery power to boot up, but a PIN number is necessary to access it. I don’t know how to bypass the PIN, and I can’t risk leaving it with the nerds at the station —Buddha knows what salable images they might find there. I guess I need the FBI.
“I’ll need a can opener,” she says. “That’s what the nerds call them. I’ll have them courier one over to me. I should have it by tomorrow.”
Chanya has seen my impatience with the computer, and I assume she is staring at me in order to provoke an explanation. When we lock eyes, though, she presses her lips together to make an apologetic face, at the same time as she raises her eyebrows in a question. I grunt. The last thing I feel like doing is hunting around for a supermarket that is open at this time of night.
“Ice cream?”
“No. Moomah noodles.”
“You’re kidding. There’s no known form of nutrition in them, you could eat them until you’re as round as a football and still die of malnutrition.”
“It’s what my mum ate when she was pregnant with me.”
I extract maximum points by emphasizing how tired I am, then drag on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. One shop I know for sure will be open is Foodland up in the Nana area, so I take a cab. I see from the cab’s dashboard that it is one twenty-nine a.m. All along Sukhumvit food stalls have appeared to cater to hungry hookers and their Johns. It’s quite a jolly street atmosphere, with people eating or sitting in the doorways of shops and nattering, telling stories of the night. A few drunken farang weave shakily between the stalls, but generally everyone is behaving themselves. When I reach Nana, it’s quite crowded with girls who work the go-go bars and have just finished for the night. The supermarket itself serves food at a small bar near the checkout counter, and this is packed too. The aisles of the shop itself are relatively empty, though: only a couple of farang men deciding what wine to buy to finish the evening off, some working girls buying provisions to take home with them, and some Thai men shopping for rice whiskey. It takes me a while to find the moomah noodles; even the packet is probably better for you to eat than the contents, but who is going to argue with a pregnant wife? I grab five packs, just in case she gets the urge again, chuck them into my plastic basket, and make for the nearest checkout counter when a familiar profile catches my gaze. Of course it could not be her, and anyway she has her back to me so it could be almost anyone; but something in the way she moves… you know that Beatles song, farang? “Something in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover”? I have goose bumps on both forearms and shivers down my spine. I don’t really want to risk the elaborate maneuver of peering at her while she examines a bag of chilis, so I decide it’s late, I’m tired, and I’ll feel better in the morning. Proud of myself for kicking the superstition habit, I walk past her to the checkout counter, stack up my five packs of moomahs, fish out my wallet—then become aware of the young woman, who has come to stand behind me. Why can’t I look at her? Why am I insanely focusing on the pack of chilis she is waiting to buy? Why is my hand holding the five-hundred-baht note shaking like a leaf? The checkout girl has noticed and decided I’m one of those dangerous men of the night. I want her to hurry up with the change, and in my haste to grab it, I knock over one of the noodle packs. Now it is lying on the floor between us, the other shopper and me. Both she and the checkout girl are waiting for me to pick it up—what kind of gentleman am I that I expect a woman to pick up something I’ve dropped? We’re still old-fashioned like that. I manage to avoid her eyes as I bend down, but she permits no such strategy on the way up. Now I am staring into Damrong’s face, no doubt about it, down to the last nuance. There is even a familiar, triumphant smile playing over her lips. “Good evening, Detective,” she says softly, lowering her lids, feigning shyness.
I’m gibbering. Unable to wait for the plastic bag, I grab the five packs and hug them to me as I make for the door. Naturally, once I’m out in the street, I cannot resist waiting across the road for her to come out of the shop. Twenty minutes pass with no sign of her. Nothing for it, according to the rules of the haunt, but to return to the shop. She is nowhere to be seen. When I ask the checkout girl what happened to the woman who bought a pack of chilis, she gives me that look.
“Thanks,” Chanya says with a breezy smile when I reach home. “I’ll make some right now. Want to join me?”
“No,” I say equally breezily, “I’m not hungry.”