22

I’m feeling pretty good, farang. In fact, I’m feeling like a farang. Truth be told, I cannot recall ever carefully preparing a watertight case and generally going the whole investigative nine yards. I must admit it’s not something I’d want to do more than once in a while, it’s so damned time-consuming (I mean, nine times out of ten you know whodunit so you grow the evidence accordingly-it’s one of those efficient Asian techniques you’ll have to adopt as global competition heats up-can’t have your law enforcement potting fewer perps per cop than us, can you-especially now you’ve dumped the rule of law in all cases where it proves inconvenient, right?), but Vikorn wants it done by the book this time. We’re going to leak the evidence to the media and run it on the Internet, so the judges will have to nail Zinna or risk impeachment themselves-there will be no funny business behind the scenes like last time. So I’m sitting at my desk making one of those lists cops like me never make:

Evidence

1. The dope. Well, it’s definitely morphine that Buckle was carrying, our forensic boys did all the tests, and Ruamsantiah called them on the telephone this morning: Of course it’s morphine-is the Dalai Lama a Buddhist? They’re happy to go into print, we’ll have the report by this evening.

2. Chaz Buckle, with a little chemical inducement, is ready to sign off on his increasingly detailed revelation of the Denise operation and her connection to Zinna.

3. Khun Mu, with a guarantee of security from Vikorn and a sum of money that he won’t discuss (but will have to be enough to buy Mu a new identity and a new life with no loss of amenities: I reckon well over a million dollars has changed hands), will testify that the meeting between Zinna, Denise, and Chaz Buckle did indeed take place on her land.

All I have to do is find Denise and bang her up for a week or so until she’s ready to confess all she knows about Zinna in return for a dramatic reduction in what would otherwise be a death sentence. It doesn’t get much neater and more satisfying than that, and I’m ready to concede there are times when your system has its merits, farang. (Promotion, here I come.)

Except that my mobile is ringing, and I’m having one of those gloomy glimpses into the immediate future. I see from the screen on the phone that the call is from Ruamsantiah.

In a depressed tone: “We had to let the farang Chaz Buckle go.”

“Huh?”

“Our forensic boys decided the stuff he was carrying was just icing sugar after all. They claimed the first tests used contaminated instruments that misled them.”

“Zinna paid them off?”

“Is there another explanation? The General sent some high-powered lawyer to explain to us that we have no legal right to hold Buckle. Then the Director of Police called Vikorn to tell him to let him go.”

“How’s Vikorn taking it?”

“He’s in his office waving his gun around.”

I close on Ruamsantiah and take a deep breath before I call Vikorn on his mobile.

Vikorn: “You’ve heard?”

“Yes. We had to let him go.”

“Have you any idea what this is doing to my face?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be a laughingstock.”

“Not necessarily. We can call for a second opinion on the dope, maybe send it to a farang agency overseas.”

“So then we end up with two conflicting forensic reports. That’s all the wriggle room he needs.”

“You can’t give up now.”

“Thais laugh at losers. I’m looking like the loser here. I frame him, he gets off. I grab one of his couriers, he springs him.”

What can I say? This is all true.

“Be careful-he hasn’t finished yet,” Vikorn says despondently, and closes the phone.

I’m back at the bar in the evening. It’s quite a slow night, and I’m thinking of closing early, when my mobile starts to ring. It is the colonel in charge of the Klong Toey district. It seems that a squat, muscular, unusually ugly, and tattooed farang has been found dumped in the river. Someone told him I might know something about it. I call Lek to tell him to pick me up in a cab.

23

At the junction of Ratchadaphisek and Rama IV, Lek says: “I’ve never been to Klong Toey before. Is it as bad as they say?”

“Pretty much.”

“You don’t mind about going there at night, just the two of us?”

“We’re cops, Lek.”

“I know. I wasn’t asking for myself. I feel so safe with you. You’re like a kind of Buddha for me-just being with you banishes fear.”

“You have to stop talking like that.”

“Because it’s not macho cop? But I love you for what you’re doing for me-I can’t deny my heart.” I sigh. “Would you mind telling me when we’re going to meet my Elder Sister?”

“When we’re ready. You and me.”

The truth is, I’ve still not found the stomach to introduce Lek to Fatima. Every time I pick up the phone to call her, I have a vision of her eating the kid alive. “Look, Lek, remember what you were telling me the other day, about the path of a katoey being the toughest, loneliest path a human being can choose?”

“I didn’t choose it. The spirit who saved my life chose it.”

“Right. And maybe that spirit has chosen Fatima -but I need to be sure. I feel like I’m holding your life in my hands here.”

Lek stretches out a hand to rest on my knee for a moment. “The Buddha will give you enlightenment for this. You’re so advanced, you’re almost there.”

“I don’t feel advanced. I feel like I’m corrupting youth.”

Lek smiles. “That only shows how holy you are. But I have to follow my path, don’t I? This is my destiny we’re talking about. My karma. My fate.”

“Right.”

“Will you lend me the money for the collagen implants in my buttocks and chest?”

I groan. “I guess so.”

Klong Toey: grave crime at its most poetic. The talat (market) is the emotional center, a square acre of green umbrellas and tarps beneath which chilies lie short and wicked on poor women’s shawls; chickens cram together dead or alive; ducks grumble in wooden cages; every kind of crab mimes death agonies in plastic bowls or gasps in the heat (both fresh- and saltwater, soft shell or hard); open-air butchers chop up whole buffalo; jackfruit, pineapple, orange, durian, grapefruit, bolts of cheap cotton, every kind of hand tool for the third-world handyman (generally of such inferior steel, they give out during the first hour-I have a personal vendetta against our screwdrivers, which bend like pewter-they would drive you totally nuts, farang); and so on. There are even some corrugated iron shacks nearby from the skulduggery school of architecture, joined clandestinely by precarious walkways that cry out for a chase scene, but most of the buildings surrounding the square are three-story shop-houses of the Chinese tradition. The sidewalks provide good clues as to the business of the shops: whole automobile engines pile up outside their ateliers dripping black oil; air-conditioning ducts of all dimensions stand proud outside another; CD rip-offs on stalls, the latest boom boxes block the way outside the stereo store. There are no farang here (either they don’t know, or knowing, they stay away), these slow-moving crowds of brown folk are as local as somtam salad, common as rice. The point: Klong Toey district includes the main port on the Chao Phraya river, where ships have unloaded since the beginning of time. (There are sepia pix of our forefathers in traditional three-quarter black pants, naked to the waist, their long black hair tied back from their fine foreheads in magnificent ponytails, unloading by hand in the impossible heat, many emaciated from your opium, farang.) A couple of streets away: a fine big customs shed and a complex of buildings belonging to the Port Authority of Thailand. The river itself is no more than a stone’s throw away, and many of the original inhabitants of this seething township have built their shacks on stilts on the other side of the water. Medieval riverboat men ferry the poor to and fro for twenty baht a trip in their modest hand-built canoes (with Yamaha outboards and millionaire bow-waves). In short, everyone knows the main industry is pharmaceuticals, for there is probably nowhere in Thailand where dealers, kingpins, addicts, cops, and customs are so conveniently massed together in one square mile of business-friendly riverfront real estate. Inevitably spin-off industries such as contract slaying, loan-sharking, and extortion have moved their headquarters here. I’m a little surprised that Colonel Bumgrad is troubling himself with a mere Trance 808. I was afraid of hostility on his part, for he is one of Vikorn’s many enemies, but he’s the incarnation of charm as he greets me when Lek and I get out of the cab.