Oh Mustafa, I want to say, you haven’t changed at all.
“You searched his apartment regularly?”
“Not regularly.” The question has thrown him a little.
“Mustafa,” I say. He looks me in the eye. “If you want me to conduct a full investigation and produce a convincing report, you will have to tell me everything.”
Reluctantly: “One of our electronics experts from over the border gave us a device, some gadget that recorded the keystrokes of his computer. Naturally, we had to get into the apartment to fix it in place, then again to take it away.”
I can hardly control a smile and find some solace in the grin that is building on Mustafa’s face. He controls himself immediately, however.
I maintain an admiring smile while I speak: “The device recorded the first keystrokes he used whenever he went online, didn’t it? His access code, in other words. That’s why you only needed the device to be in place for a short time. You got into the CIA database?”
“Not at every level. After access, there are many different checks. We never got beyond the gossip.” To my raised eyebrows: “That’s what we called it, because that’s what it basically was. Just a lot of junk, the kind of crap they love to talk about.”
I had decided to wait until morning before trying Turner’s apartment, but absent getting laid, there is really nothing to do in this town, and anyway the setup has begun to intrigue me. I think of my spacious but seedy hotel room and decide to stick with Mustafa.
Mitch Turner’s local address turned out to be just around the corner from where we were sitting. It is a five-story apartment building, very close to the police station. When we enter, the concierge, who lives and works in a small room with a single bed, a television, and a view of the entrance, turns away from Mustafa with a stony look.
“A Buddhist. One of yours,” Mustafa explains.
“You intimidated him to get the key?”
“I didn’t do a thing.” A pause. “Didn’t need to.”
I’m breathless by the time we reach the top floor and sweating in the night heat. Mustafa seems unaffected by the climb. When we enter the apartment, what hits me immediately is the view over the police station, the perimeter of which is dense with young men and women and cacophonous with a thousand cheap stereo systems all blasting out a mixture of Thai and Malaysian pop.
I share a glance with Mustafa, who nods toward the master bedroom. I first see a small stack of books, then: there it is, in a place of honor next to the single bed: a silver-framed picture of Chanya.
She has to be in the States because she’s wearing a padded parka coat and looks just about as cold as a Thai can get in those northern climes. She looks happy enough, however, and that amazing smile of hers shines through. Even though you can see nothing of her figure under that parka, you just know that that is an exceptionally attractive woman staring into the camera lens. Come to think of it, there is something special about that picture. I think it was taken by a man in love.
What a terrific exercise in perception I’m experiencing, like something out of a Buddhist manual. I replay that moment in the bar when Chanya seduced a sullen, dumb, weightlifting, whoremongering moron and substitute a highly intelligent, educated, sensitive man who already knew her and obviously adored her. I’m so damn lonely, he told her. You look beautiful tonight. So why did she kill him? Why did she mutilate him? Why did she skin him? I check Mustafa’s eyes, but they have glazed over. No curiosity here about the farang’s love life. I wonder what Mustafa does with his mind in those moist moments that even fanatics experience. Do they all simply postpone, pending paradise?
“You know who she is?” I ask him.
He shrugs. What does it matter? She was just a whore from out of town, of no more consequence to him than a ball of fluff. She was not part of any war that interested him. I allow myself the luxury of dwelling on her face (that smile) for a few moments: no way Mustafa is going to read my heart, which I have to admit has sunk just a tad. I pull open the picture frame and take out the picture of Chanya, which I pocket.
Unable to follow up on the mystery of the picture, I examine that small stack of books on the bedside table. Huckleberry Finn, a black Bible, the biography of the FBI spy Robert Hanssen by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller, a translation into English of Dante’s Inferno, a copy of the Koran in English, The Encyclopedia of Arachnids, Advanced Spider Keeping, and Problems in Identification and Classification of Asian Arachnids. I flick through the vivid color plates: scorpions luminescent under ultraviolet light. I raise my eyes to Mustafa.
“He collected them, I forgot to tell you. At first we thought he was genuinely insane. We used to watch him crouching in dark alleys with some kind of little net and a bottle.”
The rest of the books are in Japanese script, indecipherable to both of us. One includes pictures, though, lithographic prints of samurai dueling with their famous curved swords. As I flick through the book, I see it is some kind of manual. There are photographs of samurai swords and diagrams that seem to show how one is made.
“He was fluent in Japanese,” Mustafa explains. “We think that was his main qualification, what got him into the CIA. He had Japanese friends.”
Finally, Mustafa gives way to the disgust that has been building since we entered the flat. “How can children like this hope to lead the world? Look at the books, at his life. This was a thirty-year-old teenager, a consumer kid taking culture off a supermarket shelf: samurai stuff from Japan, a whore from Bangkok, a little Christianity here, a little Islam there, when he wasn’t hunting for spiders or smoking opium.” He looks about to spit.
“Smoking opium?”
He grunts, unwilling to say more.
I follow him around the rest of the flat while he throws glances of contempt into odd corners. We find the terrarium on a shelf against a back wall in the spare bedroom. Mustafa peers at it, then shakes his head. “Nobody fed them.” I peer into the rectangular space behind the glass: dried corpses of hairy tarantulas, a scorpion with babies on her back, other spiders dead in their webs as if in the aftermath of a cataclysm.
In a cupboard Mustafa finds a cheap telescope of the kind that can be bought in department stores. Our exchange of glances is a classic example of telepathy. If Mitch Turner needed a good telescope, he would have persuaded the CIA to supply a state-of-the-art model. So he used this one for what?
“Checking out the action around the police station,” Mustafa grunts.
There doesn’t seem to be anything else of immediate significance, nothing that would explain Mitch Turner’s violent death anyway. I observe that there is no laptop, but Mustafa says whenever Turner left the apartment for any length of time, he took a laptop with him, probably following standing orders to check it into a bank vault or safe-deposit box. Well, there doesn’t seem to be much more we can do tonight, so we leave the apartment and Mustafa locks the door.
Out on the street the night is in full swing. The whole town is alive with disco music and flashing neon signs from cheap hotels. A tall and very thickset Malay in his late thirties is ushering three girls into his hotel as we pass. Three? I shoot a glance at Mustafa, but he’s in whatever space he uses to block out unacceptable aspects of reality. I wonder if he saw them at all, those three very attractive girls who seemed to be enjoying themselves? I guess that within his superstition those women would be seen as pure evil, seductive emissaries of Satan. Well, looks like that Malay and those girls are going to be merrily rolling in it for the next few hours, after which all participants will retire satisfied and sleep the sleep of the just. I do not explain to Mustafa that in the Game women often prefer to share their labor-they may even see it as a kind of perk in that they demand extra for doing less. It’s more fun, too, if you have a friend or colleague to chat with in your own language while you’re working the john. For country girls there’s an echo from the rice harvest, when everyone has to pitch in, and there’s a lot of chatting and flirting and you tell jokes to pass the time, hardly noticing what your hands are doing. I think of the big dark Malay laid out like a rice paddy while the girls work him and discuss the dollar-baht exchange rate across his erection. I pity Mustafa, who so resolutely rejects the simple dance of life, the humor. At the same time I wonder how Mitch Turner, the confused American spy, took it all.