Behind the Night Bazaar (16 page)

Unmoved, de Montpasse started mouthing off about his friends at the embassy. Kelly had read about the new laws that allowed Australian cops to override the locals, and there was a real risk that if de Montpasse did put the Federal Police on to him, he could lose everything. He had no choice. The Canadian had to go.

Kelly told Ratratarn that de Montpasse wasn’t just out to get him, he was after the Chiang Mai police as well. Ratratarn’s response was more than Kelly might have hoped for. And it seemed once again that things were back on track, but the business of the missing foreign woman made Kelly think again. Just the thought of her being out there unnerved him. It’d be canny of the AFP to use a female operative. And it’d be just like Ratratarn to assume a woman posed no threat. Kelly cursed the man’s arrogance, wishing he could cut loose. But he’d bound Ratratarn to him—it was his own fault—and it was going to cost him.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kelly caught a signal from Mongkol. One of the punters wanted to go upstairs with Win Win, a Burmese girl. Kelly nodded for the customer to meet him at the bar where he’d accept payment in advance. The moment the punter stood up, the cops walked in.

Ratratarn nodded for the two junior officers to sit. Kelly liked to hold their meetings in the main part of the club, creating the impression the police were under his control, when the opposite was the case. He waved from behind the bar, pointing to his watch and holding up five fingers. A few minutes wait then. Ratratarn saw him take a bottle of scotch from the top shelf and order a waitress to bring it on a tray with ice and glasses. He allowed the young woman to pour out three shots, but waved her away when she made a move to join them. This whole business had become more trouble than it was worth, which was saying something, given what Kelly was prepared to pay. Not for the first time, Ratratarn suspected it was a serious mistake to have gotten in so deep with a farang.

Farangs were bad news in Ratratarn’s experience. On returning to Chiang Mai in the 1970s, he was made police liaison officer on anti-drugs projects funded by international agencies. The intention was to eradicate opium production in the hill tribe villages and substitute it with cash crops. But the mountainous terrain, while ideal for growing opium poppies, was disastrous for cabbages. There was massive soil erosion, the crops failed, and pesticides poisoned the water supply. The hill tribes ended up poorer than they were to begin with and rather than compensate the villagers, the farang project directors paid their government counterparts in Bangkok to keep the whole thing hushed up.

Around this time Ratratarn was approached by the local mafia lord, who was responsible for organising opium production and trafficking around Chiang Mai. He also involved himself in building roads, schools and health centres to support the poppy growing villages. Ratratarn saw that more could be done for the local people by supporting drug production than by trying to eradicate it. He’d worked for the chao pao ever since.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, mate,’ Kelly said, pulling up a chair and acknowledging the two officers with a nod. ‘Busy night.’ He helped himself to a drink from the table. ‘So you don’t think the Canadians are going to create any problems for us?’

‘Well, they’re not the only ones we have to worry about,’ Ratratarn said. ‘There’s also the farang woman.’

Interested, Kelly leaned forward. ‘So you reckon she’s really a problem?’

‘We can’t afford to ignore her. That is,
you
can’t afford to.’ Ratratarn raised his voice to be heard above the noise. ‘It’s your country’s laws you have to worry about. In the meantime, we’re going to need more resources.’

‘Look, mate,’ he said carefully, ‘you know I wanna do the right thing by you. But I’ve got other expenses and debts.’

‘Tell me,’ Ratratarn said, lighting a cigarette, ‘who could you be more indebted to than the man who got rid of your enemies?’

Kelly’s jaw tightened. ‘We were ridding ourselves of mutual enemies. Remember, it was your idea to have the boyfriend killed.’

Ratratarn flicked the ash from his cigarette on the floor without taking his eyes off Kelly. ‘That’s not how I recall it.’

‘You’ve got to be joking—’

Ratratarn stopped him by pointing a finger at what was taking place on the stage by the bar. The Australian muttered something and downed a second glass of whisky before regaining his composure.

‘How much?’

‘Around twenty thousand baht.’

‘
What
? That’s normally what I pay you guys for a month. I thought we’d had an understanding.’

‘That was before these complications.’

‘You act as if it’s my fault. Why? Because the missing woman’s Australian?’

Ratratarn said nothing, but stared at his cigarette as he rolled it between his thumb and index finger.

Kelly groaned. ‘OK, OK. Fifteen thousand.’

‘Twenty.’

‘What happened to the fine Thai tradition of bartering?’

‘Twenty.’ Ratratarn stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Fixed price.’

‘OK,’ Kelly said, ‘but give me a week.’

‘Three days.’

‘Oh, so now it’s OK to barter?’

Ratratarn paid no attention. ‘I’ll be back on Friday.’

‘You drive a hard bargain, mate,’ Kelly stood up and extended his hand.

Ratratarn ignored the hand, nodded for him to sit down again and lit another cigarette. He took his time, drawing back slowly, tossing away the dead match, and exhaling a large cloud of smoke over Kelly’s head.

‘You mentioned our regular fee,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken on a couple of young officers to help manage the workload,’ Ratratarn inclined his head towards Pornsak and Komet, ‘and they’re looking forward to being rewarded for their efforts on your behalf.’

Kelly stared hard at Ratratarn. ‘At the end of the show,’ he hissed. ‘You’ll have your money then.’

A Thai man in a purple waistcoat skipped onto the stage.

‘
Sawadee krup
,’ he said into a microphone. ‘Welcome to the Kitten Club where we take pride in catering to every taste!’

He spoke in Thai and English, punctuating each sentence with theatrical laughter. Komet wondered why he bothered speaking Thai at all; apart from the staff, Pornsak, Ratratarn and himself were the only locals.

‘Tonight we have a special item on the menu,’ the emcee continued, ‘a rare and exotic dish, native to the northeast of our country.’

‘Hey, that’s where you’re from,’ Pornsak said, nudging Komet.

‘Please show your appreciation for Khun Malithong!’

The audience burst into applause as, to Komet’s alarm, a young girl was ushered on stage. She wore the traditional wedding dress of Isaan: gold
pah sin
skirt and matching sash, hair piled into a bun and wrapped in gold beads, garlands of jasmine and marigold around her neck. Her face was heavily made-up like a bride, too, but there was no disguising her age. Small and flat-chested with the prominent belly of a child, she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten.

‘Her name means “golden jasmine flower”,’ the emcee said. ‘And what an appropriate name it is, for she is precious like gold, and pure as a white flower.’

Several men whistled loudly and the emcee raised his hand.

‘I see we have many eligible bachelors here tonight who recognise a precious jewel when they see one. But only one of you gets to enter the honeymoon suite tonight. Who will it be? Who’ll start the bidding?’

Komet stared around the room in alarm as customers leapt to their feet.

‘One thousand!’ said one.

‘Two thousand!’ shouted another.

‘I’ll pay four thousand!’ a third said, waving baht notes in the air.

‘What’s happening?’ Komet gasped.

‘It’s an auction,’ Pornsak said, cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick. ‘Farangs pay top dollar for a virgin.’

‘But this isn’t right!’

‘Oh, come on,’ the sergeant said. ‘We all like the young ones.’

Komet had been with a prostitute only twice. At the age of sixteen, he and some friends pooled their money to visit a woman in the neighbouring village. She was much older and, by accommodating the urges of randy, teenage boys, was seen as protecting the purity of young women in the area. Komet remembered little of the experience except that it was soon over. Several years later, drunk, he’d ended up at a brothel in Chiang Mai with a group of fellow recruits. The girl there was maybe eighteen and pretty, too, but she just wanted the money and Komet didn’t enjoy himself. Since marrying Arunee, he’d never felt the urge to go out for sex. Though they were abstaining now she was pregnant according to the custom, for Komet it was worth the wait.

‘Hey, isn’t your wife expecting?’ Pornsak said, reading his thoughts. ‘Maybe you should get a girl for the evening.’

‘But she’s not a girl,’ Komet said, gesturing at the stage. ‘She’s a child!’

‘Yeah, well, you know, farangs aren’t like Thai people,’ the sergeant said, affecting an air of worldliness. ‘They have strange tastes.’

But that doesn’t make it right, Komet thought.

The bidding had reached 10,000 baht and was still rising. An old, bald farang with thick glasses was waving his hand in the air in front of the stage. At another table, the only other Asian man there—Japanese or Korean by the looks of him—was bidding by raising a single finger. A group of younger men argued amongst themselves, one trying to raise his hand while his friends held him back. The emcee appealed to a few others, who shook their heads. The bidding was down to two people.

‘Come now, gentlemen, just look at this pearl, this unplucked lotus,’ the emcee said. ‘Surely you can make a better offer than that?’

Komet stared at Malithong, trying to meet her eyes. But her face was blank and he suspected she’d been drugged. He considered rushing over to rescue her, but knew they wouldn’t have made it to the door.

Komet turned his attention to the table, anything to take his mind off the spectacle on the stage.

‘What are they talking about, do you think?’ he whispered to Pornsak.

‘This farang, Kelly, reckons the lieutenant colonel owes him ’cause it was his idea to have Sanga taken care of,’ Pornsak said. ‘You know, to make it look bad for the Canadian.’

Komet felt a knot in the pit of his stomach. ‘Kelly killed Sanga,’ he said, a statement rather than a question.

‘Yeah, of course, he didn’t do the handiwork himself— hired a guy out of Mae Sai for that. Those
kha
from the mountains, they’re savages. I mean, you saw the body.’ Pornsak pulled a face. ‘But it was Kelly’s idea.’

It all became horribly clear to Komet. ‘And the lieutenant colonel killed the farang.’

‘Yeah, well, they had to get him out of the way and—’ Pornsak hesitated, suddenly suspicious. ‘Shit, Komet, don’t tell me you didn’t know? I figured that with you in on the investigation—’

‘Yeah, I knew,’ Komet lied. ‘I’m just interested in the details.’

‘Sure, like how much Kelly’s going to pay us, right?’ Pornsak grinned. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you, Komet, but there you go! You’re a player now.’

For any other rookie in Komet’s position, this would be a night of triumph, a turning point in his career when he became a ‘player’, as Pornsak put it. But Komet didn’t want to play.

Aware that the crowd had gone quiet, he glanced up. The emcee was looking in the direction of his table.

‘Sixteen thousand,’ the Thai man said. He spoke into the microphone, but the message was clearly directed at Kelly. The farang nodded, said something to Ratratarn, and walked over to the stage.

‘The matter has been settled!’ the emcee said triumphantly. ‘Khun Malithong is to wed Khun…?’

‘Bob,’ the old man with the glasses said.

Komet watched him step onto the stage with a broad grin on his face.

‘A few more minutes,’ Ratratarn said, nodding towards the farang. ‘I’ll get your reward and we’ll be out of here.’

For Komet it was like being offered money from the sale of his own sister. He muttered something about a toilet.

‘Left of the bar,’ Pornsak said. ‘Don’t wander into the honeymoon suite by mistake, will you?’

The sergeant’s laughter burned in Komet’s ears as he crossed the room. Khun Bob reached the doorway at the same time, holding Malithong in the crook of his arm. Again Komet had to resist the urge to snatch her away.

‘
Sabaidee, bor
?’ he said as he came up alongside her.

The child frowned as if the sound of her native tongue were foreign to her. ‘Am I OK?’ she echoed.

It was only when she spoke that the farang seemed to notice Komet. He took in the police uniform and tightened his grasp on the girl. Komet met his gaze for a moment, the rheumy, opaque eyes of a man old enough to be the child’s grandfather.

All farangs smell like white water buffalo, one of his school friends had told him years before they’d ever seen a foreigner. But Khun Bob lacked the earthy wholesome smell of a buffalo. Beneath the whisky, smoke and aftershave there was an odour like flowers left to rot in a vase.

They backed away from each other, the farang steering the child up a staircase, Komet stepping into the bathroom and locking the door behind him. He turned on a tap and doused his face. In the mirror above the basin his face looked haggard, as if the evening’s events had suddenly aged him. For the first time he resembled his father.

Komet thought of him now: Khanthong Plungkham sitting cross-legged on a grass mat, preparing a tray of betel nut pan wrapped in lime leaves, one of the few pleasures he allowed himself.

‘I have taught you about the Eight Precepts,’ his father had said, ‘and how I followed them diligently as an acolyte. The young people of today see them as old-fashioned and impractical. “Why should we fast from midday to the following dawn?” they ask. “Why go out of our way to ensure a bad night’s sleep by refusing comfortable bedding?” And so I tell them.’

He put the tray of betel nut to one side, tightened the
phakhama
around his waist and closed his eyes.

‘Such disciplines remind us of what is and isn’t important in this life. They remind us of our humanity and the ephemeral nature of our existence. But, my son, there are other ways we may be reminded of such things…’