The Bangkok Asset: A novel (4 page)

“What would I like to do? I’d like to arrest those bastards from yesterday, of course. Especially that damned Asset who somehow induced a Thai boy to kill his mother. I don’t have to tell you what that must mean. They’ve developed some kind of military technique for taking over a person’s mind. I don’t care what anybody says, no Thai boy that age is capable of killing his mom. Thai mothers instill total and absolute obedience in their children, a dependency that death itself cannot break. Everybody knows an emotionally enslaved male child is a lot more reliable in old age than social security. No, that Thai boy was poisoned by
farang
mind, no doubt about it.” I paused. “And most of all I would like to find the perp in the Market Murder case. I want whoever killed that girl and plastered my name in blood all over the mirror.”

Vikorn scratched his chin. “You can’t arrest the Asset or Goldman. They both have diplomatic cover, and anyway the CIA would never allow it. If you made too much fuss, they would take you out.”

“Then I want to arrest Lord bloody Sakagorn of Senior Counsel,” I yelled. “He’s clearly guilty after the fact and knows what’s going on.”

I uttered this last outburst quite certain that no one was going to give me authority to arrest the aristocrat lawyer whose connections went all the way to the top of government. To my surprise Vikorn smiled, though a tad wanly. “That’s what I thought you would say. Leave it with me for the moment. I’ll, ah, have to check.”

“With the Chinese?”

He frowned. Then, as if in a senile change of heart, Vikorn suddenly dismissed us: “Well, that will do for now. I’m sure the two of you will catch up in your own time. I’m afraid I have a meeting with the Director in an hour and the traffic is gridlocked on Rama IX. If you’ll excuse me?”

Krom and I immediately
waied
and left the room, now known as the Communications and Command Center, or CCC.

The door had no sooner closed behind us, leaving us in the hall together, than Inspector Krom reverted. She hunched her shoulders and lowered her head, giving the impression of serious, if narrow, intent. At the same time she walked next to me slightly bowlegged, like a man with swollen testicles, and used a kind of rolling rhythm with her arms, as if she were readying herself for a fight. She was chummy, though, in her natural form, and chatted to me in a matey way, making use of the latest—and most masculine—street slang.

“What are the girls like over at your mother’s bar?” she wanted to know. “Great tits and ass, I bet.”

“We pay over the odds.” I wrinkled my brow. “You’re not a feminist?”

She wrinkled hers in turn. “Do I look that old? Want coffee?”

We left the station to cross the road to the cooked-food stalls. I’d already eaten so I ordered a coffee. Krom ordered extra-spicy
somtam
salad. She stared at me, waiting for me to speak first.

“I’m a homicide detective,” I said.

“I know. And yesterday you witnessed a quadruple homicide, and no way will they let you bring in the perps. Like Vikorn said, they have diplomatic immunity.”

“Fuck immunity, this is matricide.”

She nodded. “I understand. But the key is Vikorn who takes his orders from a ministry in Beijing these days. What did you think of that new high-tech meeting room?”

“I think it’s weird, like an alien installation.”

“But that’s exactly what it is. The aliens are Chinese. That display on the map, that is an electronic gun held to the Old Man’s head. It’s a naked statement of how much—how very, very much—he owes the Chinese. Basically, he screwed up.”

“How’s that?”

“They tricked him. He was allowed to move a lot of stuff out of Myanmar—I mean huge loads—through Yunnan and all the way across to Hong Kong and Shanghai. He was already a billionaire, and he doubled his fortune. Sure, he bribed. He bribed and bribed and made a lot of regional bosses very happy—the mistake he made was to underestimate Beijing. Since they never lifted a finger to stop him, he assumed either they didn’t know or they were getting kickbacks from the regional bosses. Being a cop and a crook, he didn’t quite have the sweep and depth to figure out what Beijing was up to. Now it’s too late.”

“So what is Beijing up to?”

“Research and development. Of humans. But they’re way behind.”

Research and development of humans:
only a nerdy dyke could come out with a phrase like that and make it sound humdrum.

“And you are what? How come you know so much? How did you know who the players were yesterday, and why were you there right on the spot and right on time? D’you work wholly for the Chinese or just part-time?”

“Can we do me later? I’m sort of classified. Look, you could call this an American Age, or you could call it a Chinese Age, but either way it’s a Pacific Age—and Thailand, politically, is Asia Pac.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“It leaves you working for a boss who is owned body and soul, head to feet, by certain ministries in Beijing. When Vikorn heard the details of the Market Murder he totally freaked. I was with him. He shook like a leaf.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s brokering the biggest deal of his life and Beijing is forcing him to guarantee the product. If there’s a problem, they take him down for all he’s got. He’s a very big player for you and me, but to the government that runs the lives of one-and-a-half billion people he’s nothing, nothing at all.”

“But, yesterday, on the river, that was all American.”

“Correct. And the spies behind the cameras were Chinese.”

“Americans selling military programs to the Chinese on Thai soil? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yesterday was not a demo, that was the point. Goldman and the Asset chose that terrible weather as cover—they didn’t think the Chinese had the technology to penetrate the storm. They were experimenting—what you saw was a dress rehearsal.”

“Experimenting? With murder by mind control?”

She looked away, turned her gaze to the street. Beyond the cooked-food stalls where people were sitting and standing, chatting, as on any other day, a knife cutter was calling out from his cyclo on which he had installed a revolving whetstone, another man in long blue shorts and a singlet was peddling brooms and mops from his tuk-tuk, mothers were taking their kids to the local nursery school. It was a very ordinary morning.

“You’ve never met a cop like me before, have you?” Krom asked.

“No.”

She paused as if deciding what to say next. “Very few people know it, but the fact is, we’re living in a transhuman age.” She glanced at my face to see if I’d understood. I hadn’t. In an epoch of constantly expanding vocabulary, I’d never heard the expression before.

She ate some of her
somtam
salad. I sipped my coffee and waited.

“The West is bankrupt in every sense, on every level,” she said. “Money is out of control and so are people’s heads. Over the next decade technologically empowered civil unrest will force most countries to militarize their police forces even more—much more—than they have already. And when the West goes, the myth of democracy goes with it. It will be dictatorship or chaos, and humans prefer order to freedom when it comes to the crunch. A lot of us feel like slaves anyway: where’s the freedom if you’re working three miserable jobs to pay off your debts to keep bankers rich? The secret technology we witnessed yesterday is tomorrow’s law enforcement, worldwide. It will be every government’s must-have, with the blessing of a paranoid population. Those who own it will be billionaires, automatically. Just like the Internet moguls of yesteryear.”

“Okay, so Vikorn is a go-between for sale and purchase of highly classified military programs. I got that.”

“An unwilling go-between. But who better to use for background checks than the most powerful cop in Bangkok, together with his best detective? If the Chinese were to go through with the deal and the product found faulty—well, they call in the Colonel’s guarantee, don’t they?”

She gave me a couple of minutes to think it through. “If the product proved faulty, how? You mean, if the product is given to the spectacular murder of young virgins? Yes, I can see that might cause the masters of Beijing to start frothing at the mouth. They would be forced to claim American sabotage, even if it wasn’t.”

She grunted, then said, “You didn’t hear that from me.”

She stood up to pay with a hundred-baht note. So far the short sleeves of her uniform had been long enough to cover her arms down to the elbow; now I saw there was a sharp border between the light tan flesh of the forearm and the dense blue of some serious damascene inkings.

“You have full-body?”

The question shocked her for a moment; she hurriedly lowered her hand and pulled her sleeve down.

“It’s when you stand up to pay like a man that you give the game away,” I said with a smirk.

She threw me a glare and sat down again. “Yes. Full-body.” She shook her head, angry at herself for being careless and giving her secret away.

She frowned, laid the hundred-baht note on the table for a moment, and reached into a pocket. She took out a thumb drive. “I knew we were going to be working together, so I brought this in case our conversation went well. A moment ago I thought I’d wait a while. Now you’ve seen the tat, though, you may as well have it. Just so you know.” She handed over the thumb drive. “Share it with your wife. If she needs any reassurance about you and me working together, this will give it to her—big time.”

I looked her in the eye as I took it. Then she held out a hand that, I suspect, she would have liked to be bigger and more masculine. As a matter of fact, it was small, slim, and very elegant; no rings, though. I shook it. Now she had one more shock for me.

“Ah, just so you know I know—your little weakness for weed—do I need to say more?”

“What weakness?”

“C’mon, Detective, everyone knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Your Achilles’ heel, man. Yes, you are straight, honest, compassionate, never take money unless Vikorn forces you, and even then you never keep any for yourself. You are notorious for not being on the take. But that sets up quite a psychological strain that’s hard to handle without help. Then there’s your permanent search for your biological father. Everyone knows about that.”

“They do?”

“Yep.”

I scratched my ear. “So?”

“So I have something for you.”

She dug into a pocket and took out a vial like a test tube filled with a golden-green liquid. “I made some up, just for you, as a token of our new friendship.”

I stared at the test tube, then at her. “What is it?”

“Oil,” she said.

“THC?”

“What else? Do you know how to use it? You dip a cigarette in it then warm the cigarette in an oven at not more than a hundred degrees Celsius until it’s dry—any hotter and you’ll kill the THC.”

I shook my head. THC: of course, what else? I slipped it into my pants pocket.

Back at the station I sat at my post in the open-plan office, checked e-mail, checked the news again, went through the usual kind of distractions while another part of my mind scratched incessantly at a couple of key phrases Inspector Krom had inserted into our conversation:
weakness for weed; your Achilles’ heel, man; search for your biological father.

I slapped the top of my desk, causing the cop at the desk nearby to look up and scowl. I rose to my feet.

“If anyone wants to know, I’ve gone to see Dr. Supatra, the pathologist,” I told him. He scowled again and went back to his screen. I had interrupted his game of
Angry Birds.

To know you are a little odd, that you do not possess the full complement of antecedents, complications, traps, and habits that constitute
normal
—that is one thing. To be told by a stranger that your own strangeness is obvious, to have it explained to you that you are one of those with a gaping wound, moreover, that is talked about openly behind your back—that is quite another number to crunch on. My nerves did not begin to relax until I was a good few hundred yards from the station, on the way to the pathologist’s laboratory. I liked the anonymity of the street. I always had. Even as a kid I’d been addicted to long walks late at night in the city that never sleeps. In the small hours of the morning it was possible to imagine that those who were still awake were of my own kind: pariahs. I liked Inspector Krom’s tattoo. I admired her courage. I feared her ruthlessness.

D
r. Supatra also was odd, but that worked fine for her. All medical examiners are weird, it’s expected of them. Death is a forbidden country for most people, especially in a superstitious culture such as ours. Supatra, under five foot, slight, long-faced with the intensity of a witch, fitted her profession so well that cops who worked with her saw in her a kind of archetype, as if all pathologists must be cut from the same pattern. She scowled then checked my face with those intense black eyes. There was no point trying to hide.

“You’re sleeping? You look exhausted. Are you taking those pills I gave you? Don’t take too many, you can’t escape nightmares forever. Coming to terms is the only escape.”

“I know, it’s in the Pali Canon.” I let a beat pass. “You saw the news?”

“What news?”

“Those two families who drowned.”

“The ones on that boat? What about them?”

“The young man drowned his mother. I saw him. The other drowned his wife, mother of his kids.”

She gave me a sharp look. “That wasn’t reported.”

“No.”

I told her what I had witnessed the day before. She listened carefully, absorbing each word and savoring it. Then she shook her head. “This is the tipping point, societies fall so far, then they fall apart. This is known. It’s in the literature. Be thankful you’re no longer young. Why are you here, anyway?”

“I need to see the body again.”

“Which bits? I’ve put the head and torso in separate drawers. You know what I think.”

“You think an extraterrestrial did it.”

“What else has that kind of strength? What else gets into that kind of frenzy? Humans can’t pull heads off the bodies of other humans, it’s impossible, too many sinews, muscles, bones. Maybe you could find an iron pumper who could do such a thing, but it would have been even uglier—the perp here was so strong he pulled the head off almost surgically. It’s a terrible thing to say, but this beheading with bare hands was almost elegant—along with the handwriting.”

“We don’t have extraterrestrials in Thailand. They always prefer the West—name one extraterrestrial who has landed in Asia instead of America or Europe?”

“Siberia,” she said without hesitation. “Some landed in Siberia in a spaceship that burned up a whole acre of steppe. There’s a clip on YouTube.”

“Siberia is thousands of miles north of here.”

“So it was a demon beheaded the girl. That’s why you have to investigate. How far have you got?”

“Unclear,” I admitted. “I suspect but dare not arrest. I need something nobody can argue with. What happened with that one blond hair they found, about an inch long you said?”

“Still testing. All they know is it’s not human. It’s the strongest damn hair they’ve ever seen—can’t pull it apart. They’ve sent it to some fancy forensic lab in the U.S.”

I followed her to the great wall of steel drawers and stood by while she opened one.

When I had come to terms with the full horror of the case, I had realized that the head, or, to be precise, the face, was the biggest mystery. When Supatra opened the drawer it was exactly as I remembered from last time: the head of a young woman or girl, Southeast Asian, eyes closed, almost serene, like a Buddha image, pale and frosty from the refrigeration. I had ransacked past cases and found nothing relevant. The only case thrown up by research that bore any resemblance was of a religious fanatic in the sixties in the U.K., a gay man who had cut off the head of his guru lover and was found by police cradling it in his arms. He explained that the head was the only part he could respect and revere, the rest was animal. I paused over the long neck and remembered the Long Neck women of the Karen tribe: but they took a decade to stretch their necks using brass rings they added one by one every year. I shook my head, then searched Supatra’s grim face.

“Like this,” she said. “Don’t think I haven’t obsessed, too. This is the only way he could have done it to have such a result.” In a moment of physical intimacy that was almost alarming, the Doctor placed a tiny hand at the base of my neck and squeezed. “Imagine my hand is like a big steel pincer,” she said, “like a crab’s claw. So I dig into the flesh with my nails, which are sharp enough to cut skin and minor muscles. Then I snap the vertebra at C5, twist until the head is facing backward, and then simply push.” She was now trying to
push
my head off using her second hand under my chin while the first remained clamped to my lower neck and squeezing hard as if trying to cut the sinews with her nails. I experienced not the slightest fear that she could do any serious harm. “You get the picture? That’s why the neck is so stretched. But no normal man could do it. It’s not just a question of strength; arms and hands are simply not designed for such a feat. It’s not how we evolved.”

“But the face is not damaged.”

“Right. That’s part of the point. The only way he could have left the face undamaged is by doing it the impossible way I just showed you.”

“Shouldn’t she be bloated from suffocation?”

“She didn’t suffocate. I think she fainted, then died as soon as he broke her neck. No fighting for air, no bloating. There are no signs of resistance.”

“Meaning she knew her assailant?”

“Not necessarily. It could be that the assault happened so fast with an assailant so powerful there was no time or opportunity to resist.”

Supatra closed the drawer.

“The video,” I said.

She shook her head at me, then took me to her office.

“You’re here to investigate or torture yourself? Take a copy, I have a thumb drive you can borrow.”

“I don’t want it in my house,” I said. “I’m superstitious.”

“So you’re a normal Thai man after all. Have you been to temple? Have you talked to a monk? Did you go to see that
mordu
I told you about?”

“I saw him just for ten minutes—he said to come back.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know.”

She clicked a few times on her desktop until she found the video that the forensic team had made. The video shook somewhat at first due to the operator’s shock. He was careful, though, to follow the rule: a meticulous panning from left to right, covering the crime scene like a lawn mower so nothing was left out. It took less than five minutes. At the end the video concentrated on the walls, which were bare plaster save for the blood splatter. The video recording halted at the mirror, however, and hovered there. English characters that were not crude or childish, but quite elegant:
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge]
father is.

I had come to the morgue as a kind of check of myself. I wanted to know if I had hardened enough to carry on. The Doctor, also, was interested to know the answer to this question. In my opinion the experiment was inconclusive. I was shaking, but not quite as much as before. I even managed a grim smile.

“I would like a still of the handwriting,” I said.

Supatra clicked on her mouse a few times until her printer produced a copy of the writing on the mirror and handed it to me. “What use is a handwriting expert? It’s the one form of communication even the NSA doesn’t collect.”

“I know. But they can tell likely level of education, cultural origins, even certain character traits.”

“Sure, that will narrow it down to a few million. Better you go see the
mordu.
A clairvoyant would be more specific. Okay, I’m a scientist, but I’m still Thai. I’ve never seen such an obvious piece of black magic in my life. I was joking about extraterrestrials, actually this whole case has Khmer written all over it. Go see the holy man, there’s no one else.”

“I’m on my way,” I said, thanked her, and left.

Out on the street I waited for a taxi to take me across the river. Perhaps it sounds odd to you, R, that in a difficult case one should ask for occult help, but for us it’s really not so strange, though we don’t normally tell
farang
like you about it. To suppose that humans are rational is a largely Western superstition to which most Asians are resistant. After all, if reason has failed in this case, that must be because reason isn’t powerful enough to penetrate the mystery, mustn’t it? Clearly, I need something with more chili. I’m off to see the wizard. All the best seers live on the west bank, known as Fangton.

In the taxi I replay those bloody words for the thousandth time:
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is.
A couple of days ago I put the phrase through a simple computer test. On the assumption that the
smudge
is a word erased and that the writer was using grammatically correct English, there are not many alternatives: in all likelihood the missing word would be an article or a pronoun:
my, your, his, her, their, the, our.
None of them would surprise in an ordinary case of murder by a disorganized psychopath. In the case of an organized mind, though, only two would really make sense; either
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who
your
father is,
which would not normally be an important enough message to write in blood, or
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who
our
father is.
That would at least be a revelation worth making; in the mind of a certain kind of psycho, it might even be worth murdering for.

Now as my mind relaxed in the back of the cab it started to gnaw on something Inspector Krom had said with that in-your-face directness that takes no prisoners:
Then there’s your permanent search for your biological father. Everyone knows about that.