36
Cops who will not take money must earn their keep in other ways. Pichai’s exceptional marksmanship gained him a place on every shoot-out in District 8. Thanks to my English, farangs are usually shunted in my direction. We are not on any tourist circuit, so my workload in this respect is not heavy: a steady trickle of Westerners who took a wrong turn and became suddenly frightened to find themselves all alone in the Third World, a few international criminals with a specialization in narcotics, and kids like Adam Ferral.
Sergeant Ruamsantiah sent for me this morning and when I arrived in the interrogation room Ferral was already seated in one of the plastic chairs, a hatpin through his eyebrow, a silver stud through one nostril, all the usual tattoos, a succession of rings through his ears like a ring binder, and the kind of light in his eyes which often distinguishes visitors from other planets. Ruamsantiah, a decent family man with only one wife to whom he is scrupulously faithful, who really does invest his share of the bribes in his children’s education, has no objection to tattoos but is known to dislike nose studs, eyebrow hatpins and obnoxious young farangs who do not know how to wai or show respect in any other way. He was smiling at Ferral as I entered the room.
The sergeant was sitting behind a wooden desk, bare except for a cellophane bag of grass about three inches square, a bright red pack of outsize Rizlas, a butane lighter and a packet of our foulest cigarettes called Krung Thip, which were surely ten times more damaging to the health than the marijuana. I had been summoned to these interrogations many times; usually the farang kid’s fear is tangible and fills the room with a frozen paranoia. Adam Ferral, though, was unfazed, which was why Ruamsantiah was using that dangerous smile. Ruamsantiah had leaned his nightstick against a leg of the table. He jerked his chin at the kid without relaxing the smile.
“I can’t work him out. Maybe you can explain it. He came into the police station on the pretext of being lost, then fished in his pockets for something and out popped the grass. It was as if he wanted to get caught. Is he a plant or a moron? Is the CIA checking us out?”
Not a serious question. Ferral was too young and the dope too trivial. I would have put Ferral at nineteen, twenty at the most.
“You have his passport?”
Ruamsantiah took a blue passport with an eagle on the front out of his pocket and handed it to me. Ferral was nineteen and a few months, a native of Santa Barbara and in his visa application gave his profession as writer.
“You publish your stuff on the Web?” I snapped at him. The question took him by surprise and fresh pink blood bloomed first in his cheeks, spreading quickly to his neck and scalp. A young nineteen surely.
“Sometimes.”
“Travelers’ Tales dot com?” The pink deepened to crimson. “Great site, isn’t it? Some terrific stories about Bangkok? How is yours shaping up?” Now the kid was shocked and looking at me as if I possessed Oriental clairvoyance.
“What did you say to him?” Ruamsantiah wanted to know.
“There’s a site on the Web for extreme tourism. It’s like extreme sports only sillier. Kids like this get themselves in jams in faraway countries, nail-biting situations which could land them in a Thai jail for five years, or get them stoned to death in Saudi Arabia, or strangled by a boa constrictor in Brazil, but there’s always a First World safety net of course, which makes it all quite safe really. Then they write about their heroic escapes from the jaws of disaster in a foreign land. It’s a way of getting published. Getting caught with ganja in Krung Thep is a favorite. According to the Net the standard bribe is five thousand baht for this quantity of dope.”
Ruamsantiah angered, Thai-style. His lips thinned, his cheeks pinched and his pupils shrunk, but as far as Adam Ferral was concerned he was still a corrupt cop with a dumb smile on his face.
“Ask him if he happens to have five thousand baht on him. I haven’t checked his money.”
I translated and Ferral brightened. Immediately he pulled a small money bag out from under his black T-shirt, extracted a wad of gray notes which turned out to be exactly five thousand baht in crisp bills, which he happily laid on the table, fighting a gleeful sneer.
Ruamsantiah’s left hand twitched. It was the one nearest the nightstick. The sergeant is more senior than me and his anger has a killer quality which I would not want to tangle with. On the other hand, I did not want to be there while he beat the living shit out of the kid, so I began to ask if he had finished with my services.
“No. Stick around, I need you to translate. Tell him to roll a joint.” As I began to translate, Ruamsantiah laid a hand on my sleeve. “I want one of those huge things they make sometimes—with half a dozen papers.”
I translated. “Do you know how to do that?”
Ferral grinned and went to work. The sergeant and I watched with fascination while he moistened the strips of glue with the pink tip of his tongue and expertly patched together a long rectangle of Rizlas, licked the seam of a few Krung Thips, broke them open and poured the tobacco onto the papers. He ripped open the bag of dope with his teeth and dumped a couple of pinches on the table. The ganja was raw and matted so Ferral had to rip it up with his fingernails. Ruamsantiah picked up his nightstick and placed it very gently on the table, causing a sudden draining of blood from Ferral’s face.
“Tell him I want the whole bag of dope in the joint.”
Ferral’s eyes darted from Ruamsantiah to me to the stick, which remained thick and black on the table. Ferral stared at it. I felt a sinking in my own stomach, though nothing that could compare with Ferral’s fear, which caused a cold sweat to break out on his face. He was thinking exactly what I was thinking. To be beaten up is one thing. To be beaten up stoned is a whole other experience. Pain and terror magnified by a factor of hundreds.
“Better do as he says,” I told him.
Ferral went back to work without the comfort of irony. His hands started to shake.
“You’ve already squashed him,” I murmured in Thai.
“Not enough. He’ll be laughing at us as soon as he gets back to his buddies in Kaoshan Road.”
“You’ve got him so scared he can hardly roll the joint.” In addition to the shaking, a periodic juddering caused Ferral’s hands to spill grass over the table.
“Okay, tell him I promise not to hurt him if he does as he’s told.”
This news calmed the kid somewhat. He even returned to his earlier presumption that we were going to party together, the three of us, and this of course would make great copy on the Net. On the other hand, his eyes could not stop sneaking glances at the stick.
When he’d finished rolling the joint it resembled a crooked white chimney. He glanced at Ruamsantiah for permission to light up and the sergeant nodded. Ferral took only one toke before offering it to Ruamsantiah, who declined. I also declined, which left Ferral holding the gigantic joint with a deeply puzzled expression on his face.
“I want him to smoke all of it,” Ruamsantiah said, rolling his stick to and fro under his palm, generating a kind of muffled thunder. Ferral stared at me, then the joint, but the power emanating from the black stick was too much and he took another couple of tokes.
“He’s to inhale properly and hold it in his lungs.”
Ferral doubled up in a genuine marijuana racking cough, then carried on.
Ruamsantiah relented only when it became clear that Ferral would puke if he took one more toke. He had consumed three-quarters of the joint by this time and acquired fascination with tiny details: a fleck of dust floating in a shaft of light, the third whorl from the top on his left index finger.
Ruamsantiah picked up the lighter and waved the flame in front of the kid’s eyes. Note by note the sergeant set fire to the five thousand baht. At an exchange rate of forty-three to the U.S. dollar it amounted to about a hundred and twenty dollars. Adam Ferral was not rich. This money could keep him in Thailand for more than a week, but the wonder in his eyes told of a still deeper anguish. The West dominates through wealth; for a poor Thai cop to burn it with a look of contemptuous indifference on his face was a magical act which challenged accepted reality, especially if you happened to be young and very very stoned. Worms of fire ate through the bills, sending off weightless particles of gold; Ferral saw miniature bodhisattvas riding carpets of flame. Ruamsantiah had all his attention now, his respect and his awe. The sergeant could have stopped there and Ferral would have been smart enough to absorb the lesson, but the suggestion that he was using the Royal Thai Police Force as a platform for some frivolous literary exercise had sent Ruamsantiah into a cold rage. “I’m putting him down the hole.”
“Do you need to do that?”
Ruamsantiah turned his rage on me. “Not compassionate enough for you? Okay, give him the choice, eight hours in the hole or a fair trial and Bang Kwan for five years. Ask him.”
The question hardly needed to be put, but Ruamsantiah’s fury had even me in awe. “The Hole?” the kid asked, giving it a capital and leaving his mouth open in an O as the sinister word wrought havoc in its progress through his psyche.
Ruamsantiah stood up and walked around the desk to grab Ferral by the back of the neck to march him out of the room. The last I saw of him was a wild and desperate backward glance at me, an inadequate link to civilization surely, but the only one in the vicinity. I sat in the interrogation room for a moment regretting my wiseass guesswork. I wished I hadn’t mentioned the web site. Ruamsantiah has broken hard men in that hole of his, and Ferral is neither of those things. Stoned too, on enough dope for ten joints. May Buddha help him.
A glance at my watch reminded me that the FBI had been waiting for forty minutes and was probably working herself up into a rage of her own. I decided not to tell her about Ferral in the hole. It was going to be a difficult enough trip without that embellishment.
The smile on Jones’ face where she sat in the back of her car was slightly unnatural, being the product of will, but I gave her full marks for effort.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got more than one case, right?”
Slightly surprised by her generosity, I agreed. The FBI was in an unusual mood. When she saw how subdued I was she became touchingly solicitous: Was it something she said yesterday? She realized she can come across as arrogant and abrasive, especially in a polite, manner-conscious Buddhist society such as ours. Or was I offended that she frankly admitted how attractive she found me? That was very American, wasn’t it, to be so up-front about such a thing? People in most other cultures, especially women, would never just come out and say it like that. Or was there something else bothering me?
The Royal Thai Police tow stolen, impounded, illegal and wrecked vehicles to a fenced and guarded wasteland on the river not more than a couple of miles from my housing project. Over the years small satellite businesses—metal stamps, scrap iron dealers, car repair shops—have grown up around the compound so that anyone ignorant of Thai ways might think it a well-planned industrial zone. A stranger might even be impressed by the dedication of the police guards who patrol the perimeter with M16s at the ready, protecting citizens’ property until due legal process has determined true ownership.
The FBI has brought along her own kit for lifting prints, poking behind and under upholstery, which she has dragged into the small prefabricated office. Catching sight of a door which leads to a toilet, she takes out her coveralls and disappears, returning a few minutes later alight with luminescence.
Sergeant Suriya has reigned in this riverside kingdom for longer than I can remember; he is famous for the dexterity of his paperwork, the discipline of his men and the accuracy of his memory. He is enormously popular and generally considered one of those selfless individuals who live only to help others. His face possesses an extraordinary mobility as he checks and rechecks my own.
“Mercedes E-class hatchback you say?” I nod miserably. “Impounded I think two weeks ago?”
“About that.”
“Number?” I tell him the registration number in a stilted voice, like a character in a pantomime.
“And you want to inspect it this morning? Has it not already been inspected by a forensic team?”
“I believe so, but the FBI wanted to look themselves. Their forensic equipment is so much more advanced than ours.”
“I see. The thing is, the forensic team moved it around a bit, you’ll have to look for it.”
I explain this to Jones, who shrugs while Suriya studies her face. “Okay, let’s go look for it. How difficult can it be to find a new Mercedes hatchback in a police compound?”
“It’s hot.”
“I know. I might have to take off the coveralls and get all dirty. That’s okay.”
“You don’t want to come back when it’s cooler?”
“You mean in the middle of the night? I’ve been here more than three weeks now, and I haven’t seen a cool day yet. It’s always hot. You want to stay here in the air-conditioning? That’s okay. Just lead me to the car, then I’ll check it on my own.”
Suriya has no English and waits for me to translate. He has seen Jones’ professionalism, her kit and her coveralls and her unbending intent, and therefore understands my problem. He is a sensitive, intelligent man and I feel the depth of his compassion, which only makes me the more wretched. I look helplessly into his eyes.
“You have no idea where it might be, roughly?”
He bites his lower lip in concentration. “Maybe over there,” pointing toward the river, “or there,” pointing north, “or there,” now the south is indicated, “but now that I think of it perhaps there,” pointing west. Jones has followed his hand signals easily enough and is smiling indulgently.
“You know, I really think I’m making progress. Two weeks ago I would have just lost it if someone wasn’t doing their work properly, but now I see your point. I mean, what the heck if we have to spend twenty minutes searching for it? It’s not as if anyone’s life depends on it. It’s not a perfect world and Westerners like me should stop acting as if it ought to be. How about that, am I improving or what? So, let’s go do this guy’s job for him and find the car.” She gives Suriya a glittering smile, which he returns. Outside in the heat, she takes my arm for a moment. “And you know something, your system works better than ours, at least on the psychological level. Be nice to incompetents and they’ll be nice back. Be nasty and they’ll still be incompetent, so what do you gain by making an enemy?”
“That’s so true.”
“Right. It even has a Buddhist ring to it, doesn’t it? I feel like you’ve put me on some kind of spiritual learning curve. So how do you want to do this, intuitively or systematically?”
“Up to you.”
“Well, since I don’t have any intuition to speak of, I’ll have to suggest we use a system. How about we start at the river, near the jetty, and work slowly west till we find it?”
The jetty is unexpectedly robust and modern-looking, with tubular steel piles more than two feet in diameter, a smooth reinforced concrete surface and a squat, powerful-looking gantry at the end with a heavy-duty sling. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the scenery, as if visitors from the future built it on a whim, then left it for us to use. Jones doesn’t pay it any mind as she turns her back to it, stretches out both arms to establish longitude and outlines the modus operandi.
I try to follow Jones’ instructions to the letter, walking slowly between wrecks of cars and trucks which have been stripped to their bare rusting bones, carefully scrutinizing the lines to left and right so as not to miss a late-model Mercedes Estate. About halfway through the task Jones throws me a black look down a narrow lane between the wrecks, but we don’t stop until we reach the far western end of the compound. Sweat is pouring from Jones’ hairline and she is blinking from the salt. She has undone the zip on the front of her coveralls and rolled up the sleeves. She avoids my gaze while she squats against the wire fence and I squat beside her. I say: “I’m sorry, Kimberley.”
A deep breath. “You know, back in my country I’m accustomed to thinking of myself as a pretty bright person. Then for a few days over here I wondered if I’d been deceiving myself, and maybe I was a pretty dumb person. I got over that when I realized I was just suffering from culture shock, that everyone is dumb outside their own frame of references. So I set myself to learn patience and even a little Buddhist compassion and for a moment I was stupid enough to be pleased with my own progress. Reality has a way of kicking us in the balls, doesn’t it? Especially in Thailand, or so it seems to me.”
I feel worse than ever and am unable to reply. I look at the ground instead.
“At least tell me if I have correctly understood why you’ve been in such a foul mood all morning.”
“Yes, you have understood.”
“Let’s cut to the chase. What I’ve understood is that in Bangkok’s only police car compound all the vehicles look as if they died from vehicle plague about twenty years ago. I know the standard of living is not particularly high in your country, but there are quite a few luxury cars on the roads of Bangkok, a quite surprising number of Mercedes, high-end Toyotas, Lexuses, that sort of thing. Statistically, one would expect them to be represented at least by one or two models in the car compound belonging to the Royal Thai Police Force, wouldn’t one?”
“Yes.”
“And oddly enough, the only new-looking, late-model, intact vehicles I’ve seen are two BMWs parked very close to that jetty.”
“That’s true, Kimberley.”
“That is true, isn’t it, Sonchai? Sonchai, you have done many things to my mind since I’ve teamed up with you, but I have always forgiven you because I never caught you being dishonest. I never thought you would deceive me. Why did you let us come on this wild-goose chase when you knew all along they already sold the f*cking car?”
“There are cultures of guilt and cultures of shame. Yours is a culture of guilt, mine is one of shame.”
“Meaning you always wait to see if the shit is really going to hit the fan?”
“That’s not a bad way of putting it. The car could have been here.”
“I don’t think so. That sergeant in there sold it, didn’t he, that Mercedes which constituted a major piece of forensic evidence in our little murder investigation?”
“It’s not his fault.”
“Oh, not his fault. Are we doing karma again, or did a tree spirit build that magnificent jetty and force the sergeant to use it to whisk away every damn car worth more than a thousand dollars, on one of those barges I bet, all the way to wherever cars go in Bangkok to experience rebirth, maybe a Buddhist monastery?”
“It’s hard to explain to you, but it really is a good system.”
“I thought you were an arhat, a totally noncorrupt cop?”
“I am, but you have to bear in mind relative truth. Before there were endless wars between the districts. Sometimes the colonels came close to shooting each other. The only solution seemed to be for each district to have its own compound.”
“Let me get this straight. With only one compound receiving cars from all over the city, it was the district in which the compound was located that was making all the dough from selling the cars and the parts?”
“Yes. It was very bad. There were fights, shoot-outs, quite a few deaths. The profits from the cars are very good, you see, so everyone wanted a piece of it. Then we had a rank-and-file revolution. Cops from all over Krung Thep voted to appoint Sergeant Suriya as the officer in charge of the compound. He’s a devout Buddhist and maybe nearly an arhat, so everyone trusts him. He spends the proceeds on charitable works, especially for the Police Widows and Orphans Fund, and to help cops with health problems. We’ve even built a new wing on the Police General Hospital.”
“We?”
“We’re all proud of what we’ve achieved here. There was a party when they finished the new jetty. That crane cost twenty million baht.” I wriggle a little in the heat. “It’s just a different way of doing things, I can understand why a Westerner would have a problem.”
She nods sagely. I think my country is having an aging effect on her, which does not make me altogether sorry. I believe the first buds of wisdom have appeared under those blue eyes. I detect just the first touches of Thai humor around her mouth. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to call the sergeant and ask him outright if he still had the car or not? Just not the Thai way of doing things, huh? No admissions until the farang has exhausted herself digging up the unpalatable truth. So how is it no one ever complains? An expensive car gets towed away and the owner doesn’t want it back?”
“Oh, where the owner is still alive we always offer the opportunity of buyback.”
“Buyback?”
“Sure. Within a specific period of time of course. After that we classify it as a wreck, which gives the government legal ownership.”
“Government meaning the cops, right?”
We both stand up at the same time. It really is too hot for arguments. “Who else?”
We trudge back to the office, which is empty. From the window we watch while Suriya expertly drives one of the BMWs onto the jetty. He has already lowered the sling, and now the car sits over it, waiting to be hauled into the air. From across the river a steel barge turns against the current and makes toward the jetty. As soon as the boat is tied up, Suriya gets out of the car to work the gantry. I remember the stories of the first time he tried to work this crane; there are at least three cars drowned in the river directly under the jetty. You would never believe that now, from the great skill he exhibits in putting the car in the bottom of the barge. Merrily he skips off the seat of the gantry to fetch the second BMW. Jones is watching intently.
“New, a BMW like that costs at least thirty thousand U.S. I guess they would go for about twenty secondhand. Is that what they would fetch over here? So in ten minutes’ work we’ve just seen the Police Widows and Orphans Fund swell by forty thousand dollars? Not bad. Does he keep any books?”
“Oh no.”
“That would be incriminating, huh?”
“He doesn’t cheat us.”
Wonderingly: “Nope, I don’t believe he does at that. Let’s go back to town, Sonchai, my learning curve has been even steeper than usual this morning.”
When I reach the station the public area is full with the usual assortment. Three monks are next in line, then some beggars, a bag lady, a young girl about fourteen years old looking impossibly new and bright in this worn corner of the world; perhaps as many as sixty men and women of every age in clothes just a little better than rags. Everyone is waiting patiently with their diverse problems. When I inquire at the desk I discover that no one has heard of Adam Ferral and Sergeant Ruamsantiah was called away urgently to some traffic disaster soon after I left the station and has not yet returned. When I check my watch I see that more than ten hours have passed since he put Ferral in the hole.
The hole is exactly that, a circular excavation in back of the police station originally dug for some plumbing or construction purpose, then discarded. It was Ruamsantiah who arranged for a hinged trapdoor with padlock to be cemented on top. Inhabitants are dependent on the imperfect fit of the lid for ventilation. It takes a few minutes to find the key to the padlock and someone to help me drag the kid out. When we have done so I am relieved to see that Adam Ferral can still walk. Except that it is no longer Adam Ferral who inhabits this body. He staggers around somewhat before I put my arm around him to help him into the building and out again into the public area, where he walks into the front desk, then into the monks, before I take him in hand again to lead him to some vacant chairs at the back where I sit him down. All of a sudden he bursts into chest-jarring sobs. I can think of nothing to do but pat his back and wait. Only a few of the other people in the waiting area turn to look, and then turn back again as if nothing unusual were happening. This is District 8 after all. It takes ten minutes for the sobbing to quiet, and then Ferral yanks at the hatpin through his eyebrow until it comes out and hands it to me.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m not doing it for you or the sergeant, pal.” His voice is surprisingly strong and firm and as far as I can recall hardly resembles the voice he used this morning. “When I was down your f*cking hole I promised Christ, God, Krishna, Muhammad, Zeus, the Buddha and anyone else who would listen that if I got out of there with my mind halfway intact I’d get rid of it. My old man hates it, he calls it a disfigurement. I’ve been torturing him with it for two years. I’m keeping the nose stud, though.”
“That’s quite a collection of deities you were in touch with.”
“More than in touch,” Ferral says, looking at something on the far wall. “I been talking to them for ten f*cking hours. They helped me, you know, with the other things. You know?”
“Yes,” I say. “I know.”
“You been there, huh?”
“Yes.”
He taps my arm. “The Buddha’s great, isn’t he? Terrific sense of humor. He tell you any of those jokes of his?”
“No, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite that intimate.”
Ferral shakes his head. “Cracked me up, man. Really cracked me up. Well, thanks for the experience.”
“I look forward to reading about it on the Web.”
Ferral looks at me as if I’ve committed sacrilege and, pulling himself to his feet, staggers off in the direction of the street. In my hand a hatpin. I watch him go not without a tinge of envy. In nearly two decades of meditation the Buddha has not told me a single joke. Surely one would laugh for eternity?
Back in my hovel I turn Pisit on. His favorite female professor is answering the standard question from a caller about what the trade of prostitution does to a woman psychologically and what kind of wife does she make for those strange farang men who marry her.
“Prostitution ages women in ways they don’t notice at the time. It’s not the act of sex of course, which is perfectly natural and good exercise, it’s the emotional stress of continual deception. After all, the customer is only kidding one person that there is any meaning at all in what he is doing: himself. But the girl has to keep up the pretense with one or more men each night. Such stress works the facial muscles, tightening them, producing that hard look prostitutes are famous for, but more important than that, a great dam of resentment builds up in her mind. The first thing a prostitute does when she finds a man willing to look after her is to give up the sex goddess role and probably the charm too. Invariably, she makes the mistake of assuming the customer wanted to marry the real her, not the fantasy, despite the fact that he is only familiar with the fantasy. Then there is a dramatic change in appearance. Many of the girls use hormones to enhance their breasts, but doctors warn them not to continue for more than a year, because of the risk of cancer. Also, there’s not a whore in Bangkok who doesn’t walk around in six-inch platform shoes. The return to reality can come as quite a shock: from tall, bosomy porn star to flat-chested dwarf. No, prostitutes do not make great wives as a rule, but it has nothing to do with fidelity. Usually the last thing such girls want is an extramarital affair, in which they would probably be expected to play the sex goddess all over again. What they want is the right to be irritable and charmless, which they lost the moment they started on the game.”
Caller: “So such marriages do not usually last?”
“Sadly not. Most bar girls who marry their clients end up back in the bars within a couple of years.”
I think of him. In my mind’s eye his uniform is torn, there is blood on his sleeves and a scythe-shaped scar impressively disfigures one side of his face when he walks into the bar in Pat Pong. He came for some relaxation from the torment of war, a beer and some female company. He is a clean-living American boy, he does not hire prostitutes, not even on R&R, but three (or more) of his closest buddies died yesterday (or the day before) and a man can only take so much. He is young, for god’s sake, twenty-two—no more than twenty-five at the most. The eighteen-year-old girl behind the bar is more than beautiful, she possesses something he didn’t know he was searching for: she is bursting with a vitality which might be the only cure for his crippling sense of loss. It is self-preservation, not lust, that moves him to pay her bar fine and take her back to his hotel. She can play the sex goddess as well as any woman, but she read the heart of this broken young man the minute he walked into the bar. It is not fantasy he wants, but health. She uses her amazing strength to heal him until he is sure he cannot live without her. Some token of their mysterious and sacred coupling is called for. They decide to make a baby. Me.
They were not the kind of people the professor is talking about. There was a war on and it was thirty-two years ago. I dismiss Pisit and his guest as unreliable and turn them off. In the silence I think of Fatima. Surely her dream life is almost the same as mine? It is hard to think of a father figure who would have fit the bill better than Bradley.