“Tell us his name, or we’ll whip you to within an inch of your life,” Lek says, looking firm.

“Promise?”

Now both katoeys have collapsed with laughter, and I’m scratching my jaw, feeling out of place. When Pi-Oon has recovered, he says, “Would you two honor my humble home by smoking some export-quality stuff with me? My man gave it to me, and you know what they say about money? It attracts the best.”

“I don’t smoke,” Lek says. “But he does.”

“Do you, darling?” Pi-Oon says, looking at me. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell the cops.” More giggles.

Naturally I refuse, but while Pi-Oon is getting his kit out from a box in the corner of the hut, Lek whispers to me that his friend is even more loose-tongued on grass than he is on alcohol. If someone doesn’t smoke with him, though, he’ll get self-conscious. I am also amazed to see Pi-Oon produce a homemade vaporizer, using a soldering iron stuck into the top of a large bell jar from which a long transparent tube emerges.

“I’m very health conscious,” Pi-Oon explains. “My father was a chain-smoker, and I had to watch him die, poor lamb. I said to myself, Pi-Oon, you’re never going to smoke anything in your life, ever again, but they say the vaporizer is totally safe. I got the instructions on how to make it from the Internet.”

He plugs the soldering iron into a socket, and within seconds a little wire basket of marijuana has started fuming inside the jar. Pi-Oon takes a couple of tokes, offers it to Lek, who refuses, and passes it to me. I have never used a vaporizer before and simply suck as if it were a joint, taking it all down as far as the esophagus and beyond. There is very little odor or taste, so I think it cannot be very strong and is maybe not exactly export quality as Pi-Oon insists, so I take a couple more tokes, which amazes Pi-Oon. “Wow! Well, you’re a real smoker, I can tell. Frankly, any one of those puffs would have been enough for me.” He takes a surprisingly modest toke himself, before passing it back. To be honest, I’m a little frustrated that the stuff doesn’t seem to have much effect, so I suck up a few more bottles of fumes, then sag against the wall. I know that I’ve misjudged the strength of the product when the guy in the mural starts to play the saxophone and I can hear one of the riffs from Blade Runner.

“Paul,” I hear myself saying in English, “I’m so impressed with your decision to reject the materialism of contemporary culture in favor of a more spiritual lifestyle.” Lek giggles while Gauguin seems to be giving me a perplexed look. “But tell me, how do you make them move?” It’s true, the saxophonist on the wall is swinging his instrument up and down while he belts out the meanest version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” I’ve ever heard. Now I realize it is the colors that are playing the tune, the complex structures of tropical russets, extravagant sunsets, overripe jackfruit, heavy brown men and women who seem to have only half emerged from the earth, the cries of the human spirit that has trapped itself in matter-all are transmuted into an intense, tangible aural landscape by the sax on the wall. Then Damrong appears. By an extraordinary shake of the kaleidoscope the whole wall swirls and twists until her form emerges. She is topless in a sarong of Tahitian design, and her brown skin fits the color range of the painting perfectly; but her slim body is lithe and Thai, and a superior energy gives her power over those around her. Her black hair is flying, and there is a mystic gleam in her eye. Hello, Sonchai. What are you doing here?

“I’ll call for a taxi,” Lek says, half amused, half ashamed.

8

Of course Lek and I know very well who Pi-Oon’s lover is. His mug adorns the pages of the HiSo zines in both Thai and English versions. Here he is with the usual suspects at some ballgown and black-tie function, having his pic taken with deep-cleavage wives of deep-pocket movers and shakers. Round-faced with porcelain skin, laden with filigreed gold on his neck, wrists, and-according to Lek-ankles, he has shrewdly cultivated the banking sector of the aristo circuit, which is said to be the real reason his advertising business thrives. His name is Khun Kosana, and he is known throughout Bangkok as a true na yai: big face. His bizarre affair with the poor, ugly, but wildly gifted Pi-Oon has been the talk of the gossip industry for over a year; it seems they get on famously and really are considering a marriage in Canada or Amsterdam, and to everyone’s amazement Khun Kosana, the na yai playboy par excellence, really does seem to adore his paramour, has paid for all the medical fees pertaining to his gender reassignment, and most incredible of all has so far been faithful to him.

I’m at my desk, thinking that things are falling into place rather well. All I have to do is find a subtle way to put the squeeze on Khun Kosana to find the origin of the Damrong snuff movie. I have no doubt one of the advertising mogul’s HiSo buddies earned himself some street cred by giving him a copy; no doubt it’s doing the rounds of the jet-set circuit, and so long as I play by the rules (never threaten law, only blackmail), I’ll be able to force one of them to reveal the true source. I’ll need to have Vikorn behind me in order not to get snuffed myself, of course, but that can be finessed by letting the Colonel do some milking of these expensive cash cows who run the country. All in all it was a good move to get stoned with Gauguin – I’m still thinking of him in that incarnation (which I rarely revisit, I mean the Tahiti lifetime a century ago; it was a mistake, the whole back-to-nature thing; I was a French doctor, which is how I got to know Gauguin, who, as we have seen, has not yet clawed his way out of the third-world trap he set himself over a hundred years ago-but never mind, it’s not part of the plot). Now my cell is playing Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You”: it’s Lek.

“They’re dead,” he says. “Both of them.”

“They tortured Pi-Oon in front of him, then shot them.”

Lek has called a couple of uniform cops to secure the hut while we’re waiting for the forensic team, but there isn’t going to be anything we don’t know already: Pi-Oon, his great prizefighter face still in a howl of agony, his artist’s hands twisted and torn, fingernails ripped out, a hole between his eyes and a bigger exit wound at the back of his skull, is propped against the lower part of his self-portrait in the middle of the triptych. Khun Kosana seems to have been executed standing up, because there is a vertical trail of blood on the painting, pointing down to where he is collapsed on the floor. He too bears the entry and exit wounds of a single professional shot.

“Nobody knows anything, of course?” I say to Lek. “The shots were heard about three this morning. Yesterday evening about seven a tall, well-dressed farang paid a visit. He asked someone for directions, so it must have been his first time here. He spoke Thai with a thick English accent.” Lek is avoiding my eyes. When I try to bond with him, he says, “I’m going to the wat,” and leaves me in the hut to wait for the forensic team. When they arrive with their plastic gloves and video equipment, I go to find Lek at the wat at the entrance to the shantytown. He is sitting in semilotus facing a gold Buddha on a dais, straight-backed, his eyes closed. I light a bunch of incense to stick in the sand tray, sit with him for half an hour, then leave. In the street outside the wat I fish out my cell phone to call Vikorn. When I describe the scene of torture and murder, he grunts; when I tell him one of the victims is the famous playboy Khun Kosana, he says without missing a beat, “It didn’t happen.”

“But-”

“It didn’t happen.”

“What about his family and friends?”