45
The Correctional Services and Immigration Departments collude to keep a foreigner in quarantine the moment he is released from prison, pending bundling him on a flight back to his own country. The reasons are unclear, for why would a farang ex-con be more of a threat to society than the hundreds of Thais who are released from jail every week? The rule is strict, though, and no amount of arguing and pleading on my part gained me access to Fritz while he waited in the Immigration building for the bureaucrats to arrange his ticket. The best I could do was to ascertain that he would be on the next Lufthansa flight to Berlin, which left at ten in the evening. Even at the airport he was fenced in by Immigration officials and police.
In a fake Armani jacket, his remaining tufts of hair carefully shaved, prison tattoos on his neck, and in white pants, he could have been just another middle-aged tourist trying to be hip in Krung Thep, except for the large Band-Aid above his left ear and the walking stick. He saw me coming long before his minders did, but instantly looked away with that prison reflex. I had to use my influence to follow him airside, where the Immigration people decided their duties were completed and disappeared. Close up, I saw how strange and brand new the world now appeared to him. I was put in mind of a creature with lightning reflexes and restless habits, perhaps a sable or a mink, panicked and fascinated by the straight lines and smooth surfaces of the human world. He sat next to me on a bench near the gate where his flight would board and his eyes scanned while he spoke: “The operation at Dao Phrya Bridge is officially moonshine. Only a few of the squatters know about the yaa baa. The headman uses the contacts they made for the moonshine to distribute the meth. After all, if you can metabolize that rice whisky you can probably handle yaa baa. They’re major distributors in Bangkok and they’re run by a real big shot.”
“Who?”
“A cop of course. A police colonel.”
“Did you get a name?”
“Vikorn.”
“You’re sure?”
“If the information wasn’t accurate they wouldn’t have needed to beat me so much, would they?”
“I guess not. Nobody mentioned Suvit? The squatters are in his district.”
“No. Vikorn was the name. The way I heard it, he runs a very big operation. The squatters are only a small part of it. Maybe this Suvit works for him?”
“Anyone talk to you about the way the marine was murdered? How it was done?”
“No one knows how those snakes were organized so well, but everyone knows it was that katoy, the ladyboy, who did it.”
“How are they so sure?”
“She was seen by one of the squatters. Some Khmer on motorbikes met the Mercedes before it drove down to that slip road. Maybe they were summoned by cell phone. The marine hardly spoke Thai, so he wouldn’t have known even if she said: ‘Come kill the bastard now.’ She was seen going off with one of them. They actually escorted the marine down that slip road—they had guns, so probably the marine didn’t dare open the door even if he could.”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t make sense. If the point was to kill him, why not just shoot him?”
Fritz in turn shakes his head. “To answer that question, just spend a few months in a Thai jail. Death is just too ordinary for most vendettas—the point is to maximize the terror.”
His scanning eyes saw from a monitor that his flight was boarding. He held out a hand for me to shake. Our eyes locked. He looked away. “You’re better than me. I shat on you and your mother and you saved my life. I wouldn’t have bothered, but thank you. When you go to the Buddha you can tell him you cured a German of his racist superiority complex. From the bottom of my black heart, thank you” were the last words I heard Fritz utter. I left him to return to the departure lounge.
One should not exaggerate, at least two-thirds of the people waiting for flights were normal couples, singles, families: Western, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African. The other third consisted of Western men usually over forty-five with Thai girls invariably under thirty. What we don’t realize, we Thais, is just how simple life is in the West. Too simple. The most modest of contributions—a forty-hour week at the least demanding of mechanized tasks—earns one a car, an apartment, a bank account. Other gifts of the system—a spouse, a child or two, a small collection of friends—arrive automatically and gift-wrapped with support of every kind. A whole hemisphere, in other words, lies dying from event-starvation. It must be a subconscious demographic drive that sends these men to us; each one of those beauties hanging on their arms is a time bomb of demonic complications and explosive events. Hey, let’s hear it for Thai Girl, selflessly taking her message of love, life and lust to a jaded world!
Complications come naturally to us, we are never without them, like our traffic jams. Like Vikorn. If only one could package him for export.