The magic is more powerful the more senior you go, so I seek out the abbot and offer him the goodie-crammed bucket, which he accepts with a nod. Now I’m in the temple kneeling before the great golden Buddha on the platform, holding my trembling hands in a high wai and begging for mercy. My mother, Nong, in extremis has been known to promise a thousand boiled eggs and a couple of roasted hogs’ heads, but I am of a different generation: I’ll be a better husband, a perfect father, a better cop, a wiser teacher to Lek, a more devout Buddhist-I’ll do anything, anything at all, just to get this THING off my back.
You never know immediately if it’s going to work or not-it all depends on the unpredictable compassion of the Buddha-but for the moment I’m satisfied I’ve done what I can. I try to meditate for twenty minutes to give more power to my supplication; then, pretty much exhausted, I leave the temple. I’m on my way to the great gates, when a familiar figure catches my eye. Lek is sitting with Damrong’s brother, Phra Titanaka, on a seat under the banyan tree. Lek is careful to keep his head below that of the monk’s, while gazing at him with adoration. Phra Titanaka is speaking slowly, with a beautiful, compassionate smile on his face.
Did you know, farang, that the ancients saw jealousy as a greenish horn-shaped intrusion of the astral body directly into the physical sheath? The cuckold’s horns were independently witnessed all over the world even before the age of sail: the Maya, the ancient Egyptians, and the Japanese all knew about them as well as the Elizabethans. I know because I checked the Net. Well, Arbeit macht frei, they say, so I stroll back to the office projecting nonchalance to see if I can push the case a little further along. However, I find conventional forensic analysis unhelpful: there is no evidence to link Smith the suave lawyer and Baker the less-than-suave pornographer either to the snuff movie or to Nok’s murder. Tanakan is only implicated to the extent that both atrocities took place in his very own perfumed garden-a circumstance he could argue away with a thousand-baht note. If, on the other hand, I unlock my bottom drawer and take out the old Burmese wooden phallus which I use only in extremis, like Green Lantern’s light-mostly because it’s embarrassingly large, with the glans painted a lurid crimson-and hang over it an amulet that Lek claims he got from a Khmer moordu of towering seniority-thus producing a kind of altar on my desk underneath the computer monitor-lean back on my chair, close my eyes, and let go of all extraneous thought, what do I find? Three blind mice propelled by tight little spirals of karma that go back many hundreds of years, and a black cat whose pleasure it is to toy with them.
So much for clairvoyance; but the exercise does seem to have provoked a more mundane line of inquiry. I check the data Immigration sent me this morning. It is a curious fact that Baker, Smith, and Tanakan all arrived back in Bangkok from their various destinations overseas on the same day, some twenty-four hours after the end of the period during which forensics says Damrong must have died. Coincidence, or the inevitable response of three blind mice who had no reason to be elsewhere once the cat was dead?
2 THE MASKED MAN
25
The FBI is staring at a tureen of fat snails cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. We are eating at D’s, just off Silom, an open-air restaurant popular with those who work the Pat Pong bars.
“You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “Really. It’s quite a risk you’re taking.”
“I want to. I got into Thai food in the States, right after I met you the first time.”
I cannot comment because I never ate Thai food on my one trip to America. (To Florida; the John was a muscular seventy-something who meant well. I remember massive hands that were always fixing things, long hours while Mum and I stood around watching and applauding on cue at the Bathroom Leak Triumph, the Victory of the Fuse Box, the Battle of Flat Battery, et cetera. But he bored Nong so badly she had to invent a terminal illness for her mother so we could leave after a week. Back in Bangkok I had to deal with his pleading phone calls because Nong couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. I was twelve.) I’m not as worried about the snails as I am about the somtan salad, which also has caught Kimberley’s eye.
“At least have some sticky rice with it. Roll it into a ball like this.”
She watches a little resentfully, having graduated in spice already. She copies me, however, dips her ball into the sauce, and munches merrily with no ill effects. “Delicious.” I see no advantage in pointing out there were no chili fragments at that end of the salad.
“We think he’s in Cambodia,” the FBI says. We are still doing Bright and Cheerful around each other, by the way, careful not to mention Lek.
“Who?”
“Kowlovski, the masked man. His isometric image was recorded entering Phnom Penh airport about a week ago. Meanwhile the LAPD has come up with a whole bunch of background data. It’s like looking at a fly caught in a web. That guy was in deep trouble.” She doesn’t really want to eat any of the snails but feels honor bound to give one a go. “How do you do this?”
“Suck.”
She does so, and after a moment of resistance the snail shoots out of its shell into her mouth. She starts to gag but masters herself manfully.
“Money?”
Covering her mouth and speaking through her fingers: “It all comes down to that. It’s the California Catch. To be marketable you got to be glamorous and to be glamorous you got to be hip, and to be hip you got to have dough, and to have dough you got to be marketable.”
“Cocaine?”
“Whatever’s in style. This guy is a cipher. He has the mind of a whore: Whatever you want me to do for money-just make sure I look sexy while I’m doing it. He owes dealers and loan sharks, he owes back payments on child support for an ex-wife and two kids in Kansas, and he owes lease payments on some SUV he never drives far because he can’t afford the gas. Threats pouring in. This is just stuff the guys on the ground over there picked up in one quick trawl through the porn industry. There are no secrets-it’s a very transparent business.”
“So why Cambodia? If he was paid as much as we think for the flick, he could have settled all his debts and resumed the lifestyle, gone back to the more humdrum kind of studding.”
A shrug from the FBI. “We don’t know. We only have one witness who saw him in the last couple weeks. It’s an old girlfriend who he keeps in touch with. She says she’s the only person in the world he’s ever had a relationship with that went below the skin. She thinks he’s a troubled soul, with everything repressed. That certainly fits the pattern for prostitutes, male and female.”
Kimberley rolls another ball of sticky rice and this time plunges it deep into the somtan salad, pressing it down to absorb more of the sauce, then takes a bite. I dare not get technical at this stage by explaining that the intense but transient suffering she is about to inflict upon herself has directly to do with the overstimulation of her second chakra, which of course is the prime mover in her passion for Lek.
“Did she say anything else?”
I have to wait for the answer because her mouth is on fire, she is hiccupping, a sweat has broken out on her forehead, and her face is heart-attack crimson. Cold water is the worst therapy, but she takes a gulp from the bottle in the ice bucket. Now she has to visit the bathroom. I munch on the somtan and pick off a couple of snails while I’m waiting for her to return. The chili in the somtan goes well with my cold Kloster beer. (The two streams come together in a riotous clash somewhere in the back of the throat, sending a delicious shock wave through the taste buds.) Now the FBI is marching back to the table, her face set.