“Is that what happened to Damrong?”
A wan smile. “No. She was different. She was stronger than him.” A quick glance at me, then away: “That’s why she had to die, isn’t it?” She suddenly decides to duck down, then rise up again with the water dripping from her body, as if she has been baptized.
“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s why I’m here. I think Tanakan’s psychology is the key. You must have learned something about him.”
“Wait,” she says. I watch while she gets out of the Jacuzzi. As with the exquisite vases and jade works, her body and limbs are in perfect proportion, just like Damrong’s. “Let’s have some music.” She goes to an electronic touchpad near the door, and a long, low note seems to emerge from everywhere. I recognize a Zen flute, with its long, dry, haunted yearning for infinity. She comes back to the Jacuzzi, smiling. She beckons for me to put my head under water, where the sound is still more haunting; a liquid pleading for a borderless eternity whose center is everywhere.
She nods with a grave expression and picks up where the conversation left off. “Oh, yes. He’s smart enough to realize that even a whore needs something to go on if the affair is going to last six months. He’s quite good at sharing his heart.” Her left hand emerges from the water for a moment, caresses my chest, before giving up and returning to the water. “That’s the other side to him, what makes you forgive his rage when he fucks you. You have to understand, he’s no charging bull. More like a python waiting to strike.”
“So, who screwed him up?”
“I think Thai society did. His father was a Chinese businessman who operated on the borders between Thailand, Burma, Laos, and China.”
“Opium?”
“I think so. Tanakan didn’t go into specifics, I think his father traded whatever he could sell. Jade was one of his principal plays.” She waves a hand at the high shelves. “Tanakan is a world authority on jade.”
“I see. And his mother?”
“A Thai whore, of course. She was third or fourth wife, I can’t remember which. All the wives lived together in a big house in Chiang Rai, and he and his mother came last in the pecking order. He showed me a photograph of her. I thought that meant he was really serious about me, but when I checked with the other girls who had been with him, they told me he showed them the picture as well. She was incredibly beautiful. You can see it, even in the snapshot. One of those Isaan girls, you know?”
I nod. The rare Isaan beauty, product of hardship like a wild rose growing out of a crevice, is one of those phenomena people in the Game often talk about. It is as if nature takes revenge on a thousand years of feudal repression by occasionally producing fruit of a quality no upper-class girl ever comes near.
“According to him, she was hard as nails. She didn’t show a lot of affection, but she knew how to get enough dough out of his father to send her son to the best schools. Of course, everyone in his class knew what his mother was. He developed a need to win at any price.” She waves an elegant hand to take in the priceless vases on the shelves, the jade, the astonishing opulence. “He’s proud of that. He thinks his mother made a real man of him, a warrior. He doesn’t think she screwed him up at all, merely prepared him for reality as she saw it. Maybe she was right. How should a woman like that-like me, for example-bring up a boy, knowing what we know about the world? Should we pretend it’s all Disney?”
“My mother was on the Game too,” I confess.
She wrinkles her brow. “Somehow I knew that.”
“Statistically, it’s quite likely. Prostitution has been a major industry in Thailand for three hundred years. Most family trees are dominated by courtesans.” I want to stop her needy hand from sliding any farther down my body, so I say, “Excuse me, I have to pee,” and get out of the Jacuzzi.
The bathroom is at the far end of the room and crammed with shiny stainless-steel gadgetry. I examine the power shower for five minutes to kill time and control myself: that’s quite a stalk she was provoking. When I try to leave the bathroom, though, I find the door locked. Gently at first, then with greater ferocity, I pound on the door, kick it. Finally I ram it with my shoulder, and it bursts open. When I reach the Jacuzzi, she is floating facedown. Somehow the jets have turned themselves on again. At first I think she must be listening to the music.
I squat down by the edge of the water, waiting for her to raise her head. Little by little the color of the water turns to a delicate churning rose. I turn wildly and run naked around the huge room. I can find no entrance other than the one we used, but this is a smart bedroom, with clever devices everywhere. At the pad near the door I press a rectangle named “water jets,” and the turbulence stops. A long diaphanous pink stream emerges from her throat in harmony with the infinite yearning of the Zen flute. I slip into the water to turn her over and examine the fatal gash just under her Adam’s apple.
Fresh corpses are hard to maneuver. It takes me more than ten minutes of clumsy clutching and sliding before I can get her onto the side of the Jacuzzi. The best I can do is to lay her out respectfully with her arms crossed and to cover her with a silk sheet from the bed.
By the time I reach the door, depression has set in which quite eclipses fear. I am profoundly sorry to have been the cause of her death. When I emerge into the central area where the nymphs are still hanging out in the pool, they observe the expression on my face.
“What happened? Did you come too soon?”
Without answering I take the elevator down to the ground floor. The footman, I’m thinking-he must have told Tanakan what she was up to.
In the back of a cab I call the FBI. “At least we know where the crime took place,” I tell her. “Damrong’s death was filmed there-I recognized the reclining jade Buddha.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“A woman’s murdered in front of your eyes, and you’re not going to do anything? Why don’t you arrest Tanakan?”
“Vikorn wouldn’t let me,” I explain. “He’s blackmailing him already.”
“He’s that corrupt?”
“You don’t understand. It’s a question of honor-that’s why Tanakan is playing along. So long as he does, Vikorn is bound to protect him. Even though it’s expensive, it’s actually to Tanakan’s advantage to accept the squeeze.”
“You’re right, I don’t understand.”
“Just think Wall Street,” I say, and close the phone.
Standing on the sidewalk outside my hovel, I think about making a second call. It’s two forty-five a.m., but the person I’m thinking of calling is notorious for her insomnia. She answers on the second ring, not a note of sleepiness in her voice. Because it’s so late and the street so silent, I whisper, “Sorry if I woke you.”
“Sonchai? It’s okay, you didn’t wake me. But why are you up so late?”
“Sometime today a corpse will be delivered to you. It will be of a young woman whose nickname is Nok. Her throat will be cut just below the Adam’s apple.”
A long pause. Something in her tone tells me this is not the first time she has received this kind of call. “What do you want me to do? Please don’t ask me to cover up.”
I’m overwhelmed by a flashback: Nok, naked, floating facedown, a pale pink stream from her neck like a gossamer scarf undulating in the water. “The opposite, Dr. Supatra,” I say. “I want to know who is in charge of the cover-up.”
I’m exhausted and wired both. The processing unit between my ears is buzzing like a hornet’s nest, but my limbs are so weary I can hardly move them. I know I’m not going to be able to sleep whatever happens; why put off until tomorrow the humiliation that could be mine tonight? The only precaution I take is to enter my hovel silently, careful not to disturb Chanya and the Lump, take my service revolver out from under the mattress where I left it, and go out again into the street. When a cab stops, I tell the driver to take me back to the Parthenon. I get out about a hundred yards before the club, though, pay off the driver, and wait. It is four twenty-three by the clock on my cell phone. The last of the girls are leaving, wearing jeans and T-shirts, saying goodnight to one another in tired tones. The men who work mostly behind the scenes are going home too. From a dark corner I wait until everyone has gone; almost everyone. A tall, closed van of the kind used for wholesale food deliveries draws up. In the blaze of the Parthenon’s entrance lights I recognize the doorman, who has changed out of his uniform and is now in shorts and singlet. The arrival of the body bag from out of the building and its delivery into the back of the van takes less than twenty seconds. Now the van is gone, and only the doorman is left, staring after it. He fishes a cell phone from his pocket, listens to it for a moment, then stares down the soi in my direction.