“Our cousin called us-he lives downstairs. He told us some men brought our daughter here on a stretcher last night, and he could see that she was dead. Then some other men came to take her away. We don’t know where she is.” It is the mother who spoke. Now the brother: “She was our only hope. She kept us alive. What will we do now?”
Suddenly they all seem to be silently accusing me. I have to admit there is some justice in that. As a rule, fifty percent of problems suffered by the lower income levels are caused by cops.
“She was a good girl,” her mother says. “She didn’t sell drugs, and she didn’t sell her body. She worked in a restaurant.” I look at the young boy without asking the obvious question. “Nok was married to his father, legally, but he found another wife and stopped sending child support.”
“I see,” I say. Of course, there is no way Nok could have kept five or more human beings alive on wages from a restaurant job, but protocol requires these necessary illusions. Maybe only the mother is smart enough to realize what Nok really did for money. Certainly no one in the family would ever have discussed the matter out loud. Without breaking the omerta, though, it is difficult to discuss the case.
“She sent home ten thousand baht a month,” her mother explains, “and I have to feed all of us plus my parents on that. We spend all our time growing rice to eat. We have no cash at all. My mother has diabetes. We get her drugs cheap on the government system, but she needs a special diet. My father has health problems too-something is wrong with his brain from farming in the heat all his life. My son here wanted to finish high school, but we didn’t have the money. My younger daughter here is a virgin, but she meets only local boys who have no money and usually drink whiskey and do drugs. Nok wanted to help her find a good husband, but she needs to finish high school as well or only LoSo men will look at her. Nok said she was pretty enough to find a farang husband in a year or so, when she might come here to Krung Thep. Nok said farang have so much money, one man would keep us all. Now what will we be, just beggars?”
I see my own family here. Thank Buddha my mother had the smarts and the ruthlessness to get out for long enough to make a pile- and start a brothel of her own: nobody escapes the cycle of karma, not even a Buddha.
Now the brother speaks. “Our cousin thinks it was cops who brought her and took her away again. We think maybe some rich man used her and killed her, then paid off the cops.” He stares at me accusingly.
“I know that she was killed,” I say. “I don’t think she was sexually assaulted.”
Now the father speaks. I recognize him as a type who might be termed the backbone of our country. He speaks slowly, carefully, and very politely, in a voice that has never told a lie. “We are a devout family. We give so much to the wat for tambun. Nok also made merit whenever she could, even here in Krung Thep. I have worked the fields all my life. When I was young, I ordained for a whole year. When I die, I will go to nirvana. I do not want to think about my daughter being killed by a bad man. It makes me feel crazy.” As he speaks, he holds his head between thick calloused hands and twists it one way then another. The gesture somehow completes my feeling of helplessness. I want to say that I will hunt down Nok’s killer and bring him to justice, like you hear in the movies, but I doubt even this unworldly family would believe that. Gentle they may be, but they have already absorbed and discarded Nok’s murder; what they want is some security for the future, some substitute for their only breadwinner. There is no tragedy that compares to an interminable tomorrow without rice. The mother seems to have followed my thoughts.
“It cost us more than a thousand baht for all of us to come here today,” she says, fixing my gaze. I fish out my wallet, hand over two thousand, cast my eye around the room (not a sign of blood or struggle), nod, wai, and take my leave. Outside I trudge around for a while, feeling bad. The apartment building is only one of dozens that have sprung up on land speculation, and they are all the same: long five-story structures composed of identical cells. Blink once, and it could be a concentration camp. Blink twice, and it could be anywhere in the third world. Blink three times, and it might be all our futures in this age of functional barbarism. I have to get out of here.
When I’m back at my desk, Vikorn calls. “Where have you been?”
“I’m investigating a murder.”
“Sonchai, I’m not asking this time, I’m ordering. Don’t go there. Let Kurakit deal with it. As it is, you’re lucky to be alive. I know you don’t give a shit about anything except your piety, but if you won’t keep your nose out of it for me, at least do it for Chanya and your unborn child. Tanakan will squash you like a bug and never give you a second thought. Do you want Kurakit investigating your murder? Where will that get you?”
I think of Nok’s father and want to say, Nirvana. But I don’t have the innocence or the guts. Instead I grunt, “Okay.”
In the circumstances, the company of a frustrated drug trafficker-cum-movie director feels like light entertainment. Yammy has just messaged me:
I’m at the Kimsee, drinking. Come join me.
The Kimsee is a Japanese restaurant on Sukhumvit, opposite the Emporium and under a Skytrain bridge. It looks as if it were carefully removed from somewhere quaint in Tokyo and reconstructed here in Bangkok under strict Japanese quality control. I’ve been there a couple of times, and apart from the Thai waitresses everything about the place strikes me as authentic Nippon, including the heavy-drinking salary-men who all have their own reserved bottles of best sake with their names printed on them, waiting on a high shelf.
Yammy’s is not waiting, though. It started out as a liter but has lost half its contents. As I sit down at the dark-stained wooden table, which perfectly matches the dark-stained wooden decor, Yammy beckons to one of the waitresses, who comes to pour some of the sake into a stone jar for heating. A few minutes later it comes back warm, and she pours a couple of shots into the tiny mugs. Yammy is halfway through his bento box, gloomily picking at yellow tofu with his wooden chopsticks.
“I don’t think I can go on any longer, Sonchai,” he says in that soft California accent. “This is it, I resign.”
“Okay,” I say, taking a slug of the sake. “I’ll speak to the boss.”
I cannot tell yet if this is the correct strategy. Maybe he’s too far down the line with his depression to be tricked out of it? He gives me a sly glance. “The third movie in the series is only one-half shot. You’ll have to find someone to take it over.”
“Right.”
Peering over his chopsticks: “You don’t care? The whole contract is at risk.”
“I realize that, Yammy, but you’re an artist-you’re temperamental. If the working environment is not right for you, you cannot work. Vikorn will have to understand that.”
“He won’t snuff me?”
“He might. But we already know you have no fear of death. After all, you were on death row for a while, and we practically had to beg you to leave jail.”
He manages a smirk and drops the pretense. “Look, I’ll finish this one and do the other ten, but after that-”
“Yammy, forget it. If you want to be difficult, Vikorn will dump you anyway. Maybe he’ll kill you, or maybe he’ll send you back to jail. Maybe you really do have that kind of integrity, but so what? The movies are going to get made, Yammy, if not by you then by someone else. I’m only afraid Vikorn will want me to take over the production.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He lays down his chopsticks to stare at me. “You? You don’t know scat about making a movie.”
“I agree. Just think how awful they’ll be if I make them. How is an amateur like me going to get a penis to slide into a vagina? It must take decades of practice.”