21

Take a poor Thai girl out of her third-world village, throw money at her, and what is the third thing she wants, after the three-story wedding-cake mansion and the lurid Mercedes? Louis Quinze furniture in acrylic tones, as a rule. Even beige is garish at this level of light reflection, and the green carpet is like something you might play tennis on, but Khun Mu somehow fits the decor.

A word about Mu. Before Vikorn shot him, her husband Savian “Joey” Sonkan used to boast that he’d spent more money renovating her body than he’d spent on the house and the five-car garage, but Mu began sculpting her body before she met him. She was what was known as a late developer. Most of her friends left the Isaan village at around eighteen to work in the big city, and many of them returned for holidays to boast about the money they were making out of dumb farang men who hired their bodies for ludicrous prices. (You could buy a fully grown buffalo for what those guys spent in a night at the bars.) For years these stories seemed not to affect Mu overly much, until one fine day she stole the family savings from under her parents’ bed and blew everything on silicone breast enhancements and a new wardrobe, then fled to Krung Thep to make her pile. As luck would have it, she found her destiny not with Western men (the rigid echoing bosom and the pink body stocking proved resistible, despite assurances from her consultants) but with a home-grown jao por-a young drug baron who appreciated a woman whose taste was as bad as his own.

Joey didn’t just deal drugs-he lived with them. After my Colonel took him down, we found whole cupboards full of yaa baa, the matrimonial mattress stuffed with heroin, bales of ganja in the garage. Vikorn, who had long grown out of shoot-outs with desperadoes and would have been happy to come to some arrangement (say, a modest seventy percent tax on Joey’s gross profits), never wanted to kill him, but Joey’s other passion, apart from drugs and modifications to his wife’s body, was chase movies, the more violent the better. He wanted to die like Al Pacino in Scarface, and after years of provocation Vikorn finally granted his wish.

My dead partner Pichai was there at the stakeout, as were I and half the cops from District 8, not to mention all the TV networks. Joey appeared unarmed on the bedroom balcony, insulting Vikorn’s manhood and goading him into a duel, while Vikorn crouched behind one of the police vans clutching a hunting rifle with infrared aiming device, which he fired before Joey finished proposing his rules of engagement. Maybe Joey had expected some such foul play, for he had placed himself at the very edge of the balcony, thus providing for a telegenic fall, including a backflip before the final splat. A few minutes later Mu appeared on the balcony waving a frilly Louis Quinze white handkerchief and smiling for the cameras. She held no grudges, she explained, beaming. After all, the house and cars were hers now, not to mention the furniture. A couple hours later at the station we discovered, to our astonishment, that the dumb moll who could hardly read and write possessed total recall. She was also apparently fearless and listed a total of three hundred and twenty-one names of her husband’s business associates (a selective list even so: none of them were cops), while maintaining the same eager-to-please smile on her face and pointing her pyramids at us. With very little encouragement (well, an offer of immunity from prosecution, to be precise) she was able to confirm that, despite appearances, Joey had been secretly (and invisibly) armed and that Vikorn was correct in claiming he’d shot in self-defense, thus silencing bleeding-heart critics in the media. Her negotiating skills also proved superior to those of her late husband. Before she left the station, she pointed out to Vikorn that her life was now worth maybe one baht and that if she didn’t have protection for the rest of it, she had as good as committed suicide by giving us that list of suspects.

“You need money” was Vikorn’s response.

“Exactly.”

“Okay,” Vikorn said. Mu took this single foreign word as permission for her to continue to trade with the army. He also let her keep about ten percent of the drugs in the house. After all, the remainder was more than ample for the ritual photo-op with Vikorn standing in full Pol Colonel uniform smiling before a table laden with heroin, morphine, meth, and ganja, the street value of which was enough to buy a fleet of airliners.

All that was a few years ago. We still consult Mu now and then. Vikorn is no mean negotiator himself, and part of the deal was that she should remain an informant-particularly against Zinna, who was Joey’s principal supplier. To keep her alive, our visits to her are restricted to no more than one a year, and total anonymity is required.

Money and time have shown her to be by nature neither a whore nor a crook but a true-born eccentric. Despite the security risk, she has refused to vacate the mansion, the grounds of which she has turned into a refuge for stray dogs and monkeys, which she feeds personally three times a day, usually in a blinding pink housecoat, except on anniversaries of her husband’s death, when she wears mauve, Joey’s favorite color. (One of the Roll-Royces is also mauve.) Armed and uniformed (mauve) security guards are everywhere and constantly patrol the perimeter of the grounds. There is even a sentry box where I had to flash our IDs, and a digital camera that enabled her to examine my and Lek’s faces before letting us in.

Now we’re standing on the tennis-court carpet in the main reception room while she sits on a glittering beige five-seater sofa, fondling a young and very sleepy female Dalmatian. I happen to know, for Vikorn likes to keep tabs, that she has no regular lover, unless it is one of the security guards, which is unlikely. She is like a billionaire nun with a weakness for animals. The solitude has all but dissolved self-consciousness, and the unrestricted play of emotion across her face, from sad to gay and back again, is quite childlike.

Lek is in shock at the vulgarity of the decor and stands rooted to the spot.

Mu says: “I remember you. You are the half-caste who was at the shoot-out. Did you kill my husband?”

“You know very well it was Colonel Vikorn.”

“Ah, yes. At least, he took the credit in the media, but he’s a very cunning man. Perhaps it was you or one of your colleagues who pulled the trigger.” I say nothing. “Would you like to see him?” I cough. “Come along, I’m sure he’ll be delighted.” She lays the Dalmatian down in one of the lounge chairs, then casts a glance at Lek. “Is the beautiful boy coming?”

In a room adjacent to the lounge, Joey is embalmed à l’américaine in a characteristic pose from life, sitting in a director’s chair holding a mobile to his ear, a cigar in the other hand, an open-neck Gucci shirt and jacket, smart YSL slacks, and multicolored loafers. His huge smile, acrylic in intensity, perfectly fits the house theme. In a neat melding of cultures, Mu has surrounded him with gold images of the Buddha in his various postures, and electric imitation votive candles flicker everywhere. The decor is the house standard, and the dominant color-you guessed. She changed into a mauve housecoat before entering the shrine. I have the disturbing sense that there is nothing but modified naked body underneath.

A finely manicured hand flits to her mouth. “You know, every time I think of that day I feel awful.”

“We really didn’t want to do it,” I explain. “Vikorn would have made a deal if Joey hadn’t wanted to die.”

“I know. But afterward. At the station. You must have thought me so stupid, so naÏve, so much the typical country girl out of her depth in the big city.”

“Not at all. We were all pretty impressed, actually.”