“I understand.”

“Good. You understand. Well, that’s all that fucking matters, isn’t it? In the whole fucking universe, what really makes the stars shine and the planets orbit is whether Sonchai Jitpleecheep understands or not.”

“I didn’t-”

“Didn’t what? You’re in charge of the X file-you were supposed to protect me from this.”

“Huh? You never said anything about protecting you from Zinna’s provocation. You said keep an eye out for opportunity-”

A scream: “Don’t you see I’ve got to respond? And it has to be even worse than what he did to me?”

I refrain from saying: That’s not a very Buddhist point of view.

Heaving, but resuming self-control. “Give me a report. How many major drug busts since Zinna got off?”

“Only two. They were both attempted exports to Europe.”

“And?”

“The first was a minor player, a mule. She’s pleading guilty. There’s no obvious connection to Zinna-it was heroin, not morphine.”

“And the other?”

He looks at me, causing a great quaking in my guts. “Sorry, I forgot to follow up.”

“You what?”

“I was distracted. They brought him in a few days ago, looks like a heavy hitter, but we got focused on the farang Chanya wasted, and then I made that trip down south.”

Glaring: “We still have the junk?”

“It’s with the forensic boys.”

“Morphine or heroin?”

“Looks like morphine.”

Screaming: “Do what you need to do. I want to know where that morphine came from. I know he took my dope back from the army after the court-martial.”

Exiting with a high wai: “Yes, sir.”

I’m out in the corridor making running repairs to my psyche after the Vikornic onslaught. Look at it this way: for the Colonel to guess what Zinna will do next, he merely has to consult his own psychology. If Zinna dumped a hundred kilos of morphine on Vikorn’s land, what would Vikorn have done? Do I hear: Sold the dope, of course? In the event (not, when all was told, unlikely) that Zinna found a way of wriggling out of the frame-up, would the General miss an opportunity of making twenty million dollars or so out of the product that his arch-enemy so generously supplied free, gratis, and for nothing? Do wounded bulls charge red rags?

Back at my desk, my first call is to Sergeant Ruamsantiah.

“That farang with the morphine last week. What was his name?”

“Buckle. Charles, but he calls himself Chaz.”

“The Colonel is taking an active interest in the case.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because it’s morphine. How many times do we see morphine these days?”

“Hardly at all. It gets synthesized into heroin before it leaves the Golden Triangle.”

“Exactly.”

A moment of silence, then: “Wow! Vikorn, that cunning old bastard! He knew Zinna might get off the inquiry, persuade his army chums to sell him back the confiscated dope, and export it, right? So now Zinna has to get rid of more than a hundred kilos of morphine in a hurry before someone blows the whistle on him. All the heroin labs are inconveniently located up north, so he’s not going to have time to synthesize.”

I say nothing.

“So anyone caught with morphine at this moment has a better-than-even chance of being a courier for Zinna?”

“Correct.”

“Amazing. I never would have thought of that.” A pause. “It’s like they say: with the Colonel it’s the B plans you have to watch for.”

“You got that right.”

All enthusiasm now, with little bubbles of ebullience punctuating his speach: “I’ll go check on Buckle myself-he’s downstairs in the cells. I’ll call you back in five.”

“Great.”

While we’re waiting for the good sergeant, farang, let me revisit the Buckle bust with you. It happened about a day before Chanya killed Mitch Turner.

18

Flashback: I was having a quiet morning pottering around the Old Man’s Club when my cell phone started ringing. It was Lieutenant Manhatsirikit at her least glamorous.

“Get over here, pronto.”

I showered quickly and grabbed a cab, only to discover when I arrived that it was not a shoot-out or an investigation by the Crime Suppression Division (our anticorruption bureau: everyone’s worst scenario) but an interpretation job. I’m the only one in the station who speaks English worth a damn, so they tend to drag me in whenever there’s a farang who needs terrifying. (Hard to convey the finer points of intimidation if the perp doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.) This guy, though, was something else: the kind of shaved skull like a pink coconut that belongs on the end of a battering ram, a fat round face bursting with Neolithic fury, small eyes, ironmongery hanging from his pincushion ears, short and incredibly muscular arms and legs, a frown characteristic of the intellectually deprived, tattoos on both forearms screaming of his inextinguishable love for Mother (left forearm) and Denise (on the right, in indigo, from elbow to wrist), and puncture marks in all major veins. On the bare wooden table in the equally bare interrogation room: two suitcases, open to show plastic-wrapped gray blocks about six inches by four. Ruamsantiah handed me a British passport: Charles Valentine Buckle. The sergeant explained that Buckle had been caught at his hotel in a combined police/customs operation after a tip-off, bang to rights.

“Tell me if he’s as stupid as he looks,” Sergeant Ruamsantiah ordered me.

“And if he is?”

“Then we better start looking for Denise.”

Ruamsantiah’s intuitive approach to law enforcement is famous throughout the station. I myself would have preferred a more thorough investigation, in which the stages of detection are more clearly defined, but his conclusion that this sack of testosterone:

1. was too stupid to arrange for the purchase, transportation, and export of $500,000 worth of morphine on his own;

2. must therefore be within the control of another person of superior intellect, who on the evidence of his tattoos and macho-slave posture was likely to be a woman;

3. whose name, on the balance of probability, was likely to be Denise,

was hard to fault. I noted, with admiration, that the Denise tattoo was darker and fresher than the other, which virtually proved Ruamsantiah’s hypothesis. Indeed, the more I looked at him, the more convinced was I-as was Ruamsantiah-that he would not make a move without Denise. Yep, Denise done it.

“His mobile?”

Ruamsantiah took a rather outdated Siemens from a drawer under the table and handed it to me. With considerable pride I was able to locate both his telephone address book on the sim card and the list of numbers recently dialed and calls received. (You don’t work with whores without learning mobiles, farang.) There was a predominance of one particular number, which looked like another mobile. When I checked with the address book, I saw that it corresponded to the number under the single letter D. The Pink Coconut was watching me with increasing fury, which expressed itself in recurring bursts of sweat with which his face and shaved pate were covered, just as if he’d come in from a tropical storm. (There was a periodic seeping and an unpleasant odor characteristic of consumers of dairy products-you don’t get that sort of stink with lemongrass.)

“D is for Denise, right?” I snapped.

I did not, myself, consider this as evidence of forensic brilliance on my part, but Charles Buckle was clearly impressed. “Yeah.” Then he clammed his mouth shut in an odd kind of way, fearing he’d said too much.

“Let’s see if she’s awake, shall we?”

I used the autodial feature to call the number under D. Twelve rings before a British accent that had been dragged from the bottomless pit of sleep answered. “Chrissake Chaz, what the fuck d’you want now?”