“I’ve never seen one as good as that before,” Lek says.

In the cab on the way to the station, stuck in a brooding jam at the intersection between Petburri Road and Soi 39 (on the other side of the glass: carbon monoxide laced with air), Lek says: “Did you know that according to Buddhism there were three human beings at the beginning of the world?”

“Yes.”

“A man, a woman, and a katoey?”

“That’s right.”

“And we’ve all been all three, over and over again, going back tens of thousands of years?”

“Correct.”

“But the katoey is always the loner.”

“Katoey is a tough part of the cycle,” I say as gently as I can.

“What’s a Trance 808?”

“The murder, love. It comes from the number of the standard homicide documentation: T808. Vikorn called it Trance 808 once, and it caught on.”

Back at the station Manny (she’s five feet tall-just-and so dark she’s almost black, with the intensity of a scorpion) commands me in her most severe tone to go see Vikorn. “Don’t take him with you,” she adds, not rising from her desk, jerking her chin at Lek. In a meaningful glance at me, she adds: “The old man’s been looking at the Ravi pictures.”

I turn pale but say nothing.

Upstairs, I’m standing all alone on the bare wooden boards outside his office. In response to my knock, a bark: “What?”

“It’s me.”

“Get the fuck in here.”

I enter gingerly, in case he’s waving his pistol around, a common adjunct to Vikornic rage. Well, actually he has taken it out, it’s lying on his desk, but the signals are even worse. In a single timeless locking of eyes, I see that he’s been playing those old memory tapes again; wallowing. There’s a near-empty bottle of Mekong rice whiskey next to the gun, and an album of photographs in a large plastic cube showing his son Ravi at key moments in his short life. Ravi ’s corpse dominates the montage.

For everyone in District 8, the story is fundamental to our mythology. None of us were there at the time, but each of us has lived every moment. A few snaps from the photo album will be enough for your astute understanding, farang:

Snapshot 1: Ravi at age zero. Vikorn, husband to four wives, father to eight girls, holds his only son as if he were holding the meaning of life.

Snapshot 2: Ravi aged five, playing kiddie golf in a lush garden with the lovestruck Colonel.

Snapshot 3: Ravi at age sixteen bearing the symptoms of a seriously spoiled brat (smirk; gold Rolex; Yamaha V MAX motorbike; a beautiful girlfriend he was in the process of destroying with cocaine, sex, and alcohol; the old man making up the threesome with an obscene beam).

Snapshot 4: Ravi in his early twenties in Gucci casual standing in front of his scarlet Ferrari in Vikorn’s country estate up in Chiang Mai.

Snapshot 5: Ravi dead from a wound in his chest, his shirt soaked in pink blood fresh from the lungs.

The riots of May 1992 took everyone by surprise. It was supposed to be just another army coup (we’ve had thirteen since our first constitution in 1932, nine of them successful), but something had changed in the common people. General Suchinda, our prime minister of the month, was totally wrong-footed: the downtrodden were actually marching for democracy. A few bullets should do the trick. The order was given from on high. Zinna, no more than a colonel at the time, was one of those officers who believe in leading by example. (Perhaps he doubted his men would fire on their own people?) He raised his own gun, a large pistol, and fired just as he gave the order for his men to do likewise. Fifty died in the un-Buddhist bloodbath. Outrage and democracy swiftly followed (it was that or civil war), but Ravi, it seems, had never intended to join the march; he had simply been forced to abandon his Ferrari because the demonstrators were blocking the street and he got caught up in their rage. (The autopsy revealed white powder all but blocking Ravi ’s nasal passages; he had died with a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in his left hand, and the alcohol level in his blood was high.)

No mention is made of Ravi in the final report of the commission of inquiry into the riots, but every Thai understood what had gone on in Zinna’s mind when he selected his one and only target. Ravi, you see, looked like a rich man’s child, even from a distance. Perhaps Zinna didn’t know who he was, but he understood very well what he was, and by all the rules of feudalism he should have held his fire. But Zinna, an upwardly mobile soldier-gangster of humble origins with chips on both shoulders, saw no reason for special treatment and fired deliberately at the arrogant, spoiled, drunk, drugged product of the system he served. Or did Zinna indeed recognize the son of his greatest rival? This is Vikorn’s firm belief, for Zinna had purchased his commission with the fruits of his own substantial trafficking. Only Zinna knows what was in his mind when he pulled the trigger, but certain it is that with one fatal shot, he started a feud to last a lifetime. An unexpected consequence has been Vikorn’s passionate conversion to democracy. He saw that the people were the only stick big enough with which to beat the army.

There have been many skirmishes in this war, for Zinna is no mean adversary. Deciding eventually, like all great narrators, that truth is best expressed through fiction, Vikorn one day last year had a truck dump a pile of morphine bricks onto Zinna’s land in his country hideout up in Chiang Mai, then tipped off the local police chief. The scandal almost sank the General, but with his usual resilience he mounted a spirited defense at his court-martial, during which he supplied video shots taken from a security camera. The film showed a truck inexplicably arriving across a field, then two young men wearing black lace-up boots unhooking the back and pulling the gray brick-sized contents onto the land. Close-ups indicated the boots were not army but police issue.

The minute he saw that Zinna would survive his trial, Vikorn began another tack. Rather than micromanage Zinna’s downfall himself, he has instead guaranteed promotion and a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any cop in District 8 who finally nails the General. In addition, he has placed a trusted subordinate in charge of the file (if you can call it that, for nothing is ever written down in this inquiry), with the standing instruction to work on it whenever there’s nothing more pressing in the in-box. Vikorn’s choice of subordinate in this case was shrewd in the extreme: how did he guess that buried among my most secret defilements was a passion for promotion?

“He dropped the mark on my patch.” Vikorn glares at me.

“Not the best party manners.”

“Don’t give me your fucking supercilious farang back-chat.”

“Sorry.”

“D’you realize what this means?”

“Maybe I’m missing the finer points.”

“Maybe you’re missing the main fucking point. Would you come to my house and drop an elephant turd on my Persian rug?”

“Your what?”

“That’s the level of insult. It doesn’t get worse than this. No one, I mean no one, not even your army fuckups, does this. It’s the main rule. Without it we’d have-we’d have-”

“Anarchy?”

He looks at me but does not see me. In this case blind rage is no metaphor. He stops abruptly, goes to his desk, and picks up the gun to examine it curiously, as if unsure of the crimes it is about to commit, then with great care lays it down again next to the photos. I breathe a sigh of relief, for I have seen this before: the white heat of his fury slowly but surely mastered by a Herculean determination to use his great intellect for the purpose of spite. He looks at me again, eyes still glazed somewhat, but brighter. “Yes, anarchy. Do farang really suppose that our society could survive one minute without rules? Just because we don’t follow the written ones doesn’t make us third-world bums. No jao por wastes a mark on another jao por’s patch. It just doesn’t happen. This could take us back to the stone age.”