31
The Matichon daily reports that an unusual number of ghouls have been sighted at the notorious junction of Rama VI and Traimit. This is an accident black spot and experts opine that the ghouls are the spirits of the dead who lost their lives in crashes and are now intent on causing still more fatal accidents for the sake of companionship. In death as in life, it seems, my people love to party.
Reluctantly, I pull off my headphones. This is the moment I’ve set myself to visit Pichai’s old room.
It is in the same project as my own, an identical room in an identical building half a mile away. At least, the architecture of the room is identical to mine. Pichai owned a TV which he left on all the time when he was at home, and a very modest stereo system on which he played Thai rock (especially Carabao) and sermons from eminent Buddhist abbots.
A superficial observer might have expected me to be the one who took the decision to ordain, but this is to leave out of account the decisiveness required to step onto the spiritual escalator called the Eightfold Path. True, it was Pichai, not I, who killed that dealer, but that only goes to show he was capable of making a decision. I, on the other hand, find myself to be one of life’s ditherers. Was the Buddha really a transcendent genius who pointed out all that time ago that Nothing was even more inevitable than death and taxes? Or was he a third-century B.C. dropout who could not cope with the rigors of statecraft? His dad the King certainly thought so and refused to talk to him, post enlightenment. Is it my farang blood which fills my mind with such sacrilegious thoughts from time to time? And why should I be thinking this in Pichai’s room? I’ve actually come for his silk short-sleeved shirt and his Fila loafers, which he won’t need anymore, but find that they are gone, along with the TV and the stereo. There is no one to blame; soon after he decided to ordain he stopped locking his room, claiming that anyone desperate enough to steal from him was welcome to whatever they could carry away. Nobody stole anything for months, but after his death I guess his property was seen as fair game. I return sadly to my own room. In my absence someone has slid a piece of toilet tissue under my door. It is gray with grime and folded in a way which makes it difficult to open out. When I do so I find a short phrase in English: Must see you. Fritz. I know it is my duty to destroy the evidence, which I do by dropping it down the hole in the corner of my room.
When Pichai was alive I never felt the smallness of my home, its squalor. Working with farangs has not helped. Even the poorest of them have windows. I wonder if a miracle of modern technology will help me in my hour of need? I take out the Motorola that Rosen gave me and decide to change the ringing tune. I work steadily through the instructions in the manual and find that I have been given a choice of fifteen different tunes which includes the American national anthem but not that of any other country. Star Wars is the only attractive option, but I hesitate to copy Rosen. Angrily I realize that Motorola has led me down a labyrinth of apparent choice leading to a dead end. I have found the perfect paradigm of Western culture, but without Pichai to share it with, who gives a shit anyway? I return the tune to the factory setting, a perfectly acceptable bleep. The exercise has not improved my sense of well-being.
I am still in a maudlin mood and looking at Pichai’s Buddha necklace as I pass it from hand to hand like a fistful of sand when there is a knock on my door. Nobody ever visits me here, so the knock is obviously a message from Pichai, proof that he is looking after me from the other side. I cross the room in one stride and pull back the bolt.
The FBI has reinvented herself. Jones is wearing a T-shirt with the headline SO MANY MEN SO LITTLE TIME screaming from her bosom, denims cut off just a little below her crotch, sandals with Velcro fastenings. She has dyed her hair the color of a carrot and cropped it in some spiky boyish style and is wearing a smile I’ve not seen on her before. Wet-look lipstick. I do not conceal my astonishment.
“Hi. Ah, am I disturbing you? This isn’t a good moment, right?”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“I looked it up on the computer. Look, this obviously isn’t—”
“I meant, how did you find the project?”
“Oh, right. Well, I’ve hired a car with driver. It’s incredibly inexpensive here. The Bureau’s paying, anyway. It’s part of my job to look after you, but I’ll go if this is a bad moment.”
She is looking over my shoulder. I step aside. “Come in.”
She takes the step over the threshold. “This is . . .”
“This is where I live.”
It is not difficult for me to see with her eyes. My cave is a windowless box ten feet by eight feet with a flimsy shacklike structure at one end to conceal the hole in the ground. Ventilation comes from a black hole in the rear wall which gives onto a shaft which services all the other apartments. On a windy day I know what every one of my neighbors is having for lunch. There is a picture of the King on one wall, and a narrow set of bookshelves where any normal person would have placed a television. The books are all in Thai script, so I explain to Jones, who tries to examine them: “Buddhism. I’m a Buddhist bookworm.”
The only furniture is a futon on the floor. Jones is clearly dumbfounded. To her credit she makes no attempt at concealment. “I . . . I don’t know what to say, Sonchai. I’ve never seen . . . I mean . . .”
“You’ve never seen such a hovel?” I feel hard toward her. I would like to rub her nose in this reality, but my depression has miraculously disappeared.
She looks me in the eye. “No, I’ve never seen such a hovel. I’m sorry.”
“Welcome to the Third World.”
Sex is an odd thing, isn’t it? A power that can transform your mood like a drug. She stands there, glowing with health and some kind of anticipation, and the images of immediate coupling are surely flooding her mind as well as mine. We both cough at the same time. She smiles with those vivid wet-look lips.
“I figured you might need some cheering up, so I bought two tickets for the kickboxing at Lumpini Stadium tonight. It’s Saturday. I hear there’s a big fight. Maybe you want to take me? I see it as part of my orientation. If you don’t want to, though, if you’d rather stay here and get suicidal . . .”
The car is a white Mercedes. In the back seat Jones says: “I tried watching Thai TV last night. I think I got a soap, but not a soap like I’ve ever seen before. People kept dying and being reborn and carrying on the conversation they were having just before they died, and there were ghosts and a bunch of wizards who could defy gravity and lived in some enchanted land about five miles above the earth. Would you say that represents the Thai mind?”
“Five miles high is about right. But you left out the skeleton.”
“That’s right, there was a nifty human skeleton following the lead couple all over the place. What was he doing?”
“You have to bear in mind we are a holistic people. We cannot take little bits of life, like lovers walking off into the sunset, and pretend that’s the final word.”
On the way to Lumpini I feel the need for a cultural lecture: “You shouldn’t call it kickboxing. Kickboxing is a synthetic sport that had to be invented after those Bruce Lee movies. Muay Thai is something else.”
“Oh, it is? What are the rules?”
“Actually, there are none.”
A grunt from Jones. “Why am I not surprised?”
“At least there weren’t, until we had to invent some to make it acceptable to international television. Now the boxers wear those ridiculous gloves. In the old days a boxer would dip pieces of gauze in a pot of glue, then wrap them around his fists and drizzle ground glass over them.”
“Nice.”
“We’re talking about national defense. Until relatively recently our wars with Burma—we’re always going to war with Burma—consisted mostly of hand-to-hand combat. Primitive in the extreme, no? On the other hand, there were no civilian casualties, no deaths from friendly fire, nobody lost their home. In fact, it was rare for more than a thousand or so men on either side to die in a full-scale war.”
“I get the point. The world has come a long way since then, right?” She leans back, sinking down into the seat like a kid.
“Muay Thai really came into its own in the seventies when martial arts black belts from Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong challenged our boys. The cream of karate, kung fu, judo and all the others came over for a grand tournament.” I pause for effect.
“Okay, I’m hooked. What happened? I guess the other guys lost, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”
“None of the other guys lasted a full minute in the ring with a Thai boxer. They just weren’t used to being kicked in the face. Our boys get kicked in the face from the age of six, when they first start to train. The other guys looked more like dancing masters than fighters.”
“Let me guess the moral. Don’t mess with a Thai, right?”
“It’s a mistake to make us mad.”
We fall into silence for a full five minutes. My mood starts to revert.
“Want to talk about it?” Jones asks without looking at me. “In the States we always say it’s good to talk about things that are weighing on your mind. I’ll be straight with you, Sonchai, you really freaked out Tod Rosen with your little comment when you first met him. He would feel a lot better if you and I got to know each other.”
“I did? Did I make some social faux pas?”
“You said you were going to snuff out whoever was responsible for the death of your partner. That didn’t matter so much when it looked like a local gangland murder. Now that the hallowed name of Sylvester Warren has come up, Tod’s nervous.”
“Do American cells have windows?”
“You don’t give a shit, do you? I’ve never yet met a man I couldn’t figure out. But you . . .” She shakes her head.
“I think Rosen is nervous about many things. Why is he here? Bangkok isn’t exactly a good career move for a man like him. He screwed up, didn’t he?”
“His third marriage failed and he developed a drinking problem. He’s a good man, very fair, and people like to work for him.”
“And Nape?”
“Nape? Jack Nape is one of those Western men who arrive in Bangkok one day and by the next have vowed never to leave. I guess you could call him a refugee from feminism. He married a local woman, and the minute the Bureau recalls him Stateside is the minute he resigns. He’ll probably get a job with some American law firm with an office here. He’s very bright, knows a lot about your country. They say his Thai isn’t bad.”
I do not explain that Rosen was a doctor last time around, who suffered an appalling nervous breakdown which he is still trying to deal with. Nape was a woman, a housewife who poisoned her husband. Jones was a man, a gangster and womanizer of enormous appetite. He was the one Nape poisoned, which is why they have come across each other again this time around, with much of the previous hostility.
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Why have you changed your image? I thought you were committed to American pie?”
A hostile look from Jones. “You want to know? I got tired of being invisible in this damn town. Girls have egos, that’s the main message of the twenty-first century, so better get used to it.”
“You weren’t turning any heads?”
A smoldering pause. “I don’t entirely blame the Western men over here. I met Nape’s wife last night. She’s stunning and walks like her parents paid a million dollars for comportment classes. But then, most of the women here move like that, don’t they? Even the ones with no education at all.”
“Have the haircut and the T-shirt helped?”
“Nope. Can we talk about you now?”
“I’m a career inadequate. Ask my Colonel. In ten years I’ve made no useful contribution to the force.”
“You feel guilty about not taking bribes?”
“You must understand, the Royal Thai Police Force has always been way ahead of its time. It’s run like a modern industry, every cop is a profit center.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that. I guess a cop enjoys immunity from prosecution for just about everything, right?”
I have to think about that one. “Cops giving evidence against cops in open court would not be good for the esprit de corps. Transgressions are dealt with internally.”
“Oh yeah? What happens to the bad apples, they’re barred from taking bribes for a week?”
“Something like that, unless they’re really bad.” I’ve piqued her interest. She smells blood and a damn good story for the guys back home.
“C’mon, let me have it, what medieval punishment for the ones who really piss off the colonels?”
“Mandatory suicide,” I mutter. “We are a gentlemanly service and extreme transgressors are expected to act like men, after due process.”
“A kangaroo court?”
An image flashes before my mind. I’m not the type who is normally invited to these secret proceedings. It has only happened to me once: a somber mood in a large bare room full of chairs, cops of all ranks selected from every district in Krung Thep, a very scared sergeant sitting in the defendant’s chair, a small table in front of him with a service revolver and a glass of water. I want to change the subject. “It’s not all bad. Take a young farang who’s caught with some ganja. He pays five thousand baht to the cop who caught him, which is a reasonable sum. He gets off with a lesson and a fright. If he were prosecuted and sent to jail in Bang Kwan, his life would certainly be ruined. He would risk all kinds of diseases, probably incur a serious drug addiction. Our system is humane and compassionate. It is also cost effective. The cop receives a bonus without any extra burden on the taxpayer. Police salaries have been at starvation level forever.”
Jones cannot decide if I’m serious or not. “Well, that’s a long way from the American viewpoint. It’s a given that our laws are applied evenly to every citizen—the alternative is total sleaze.”
“In that case, why aren’t we investigating Sylvester Warren?”
Her head snaps away and she is looking out the window. “Cute, aren’t you?”
A long silence. Finally, she slowly turns her head back toward me. “Actually, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Only don’t tell anyone.”