They’ve laid Chaz Buckle out on the dockside under a blanket. The police launch is tied up to a capstan between two gigantic container vessels. The view is blocked in every direction by looming bows, rusting sterns, and iron gangplanks. Impenetrable marine shadows cast darkness over the poorly lit footpaths. Bumgrad nods to me, and I lift the blanket: a single shot in the back of the head, with exit wound that blew out his left eye. He is soggy from time spent in the river, but the assassination is recent. Even if I did not recognize the ruined face, the tattoos would have been identification enough.

“We haven’t checked his pockets yet,” Bumgrad murmurs. “We thought maybe you would want to do that.”

I lean over the body, then jump back as a small blind eel wriggles from out his mouth. His pockets are undulating. Lek, watching closely, puts a hand over his mouth. When I rip open his shirt, I see that his stomach, too, is in perpetual motion. There is a faint pop, and a blind white head with mouth full of tiny teeth emerges from his belly button. I snap my head around-is this some kind of joke?-but Bumgrad and his men are gone, disappeared into the black maze of the dock. Lek steps back, stifling a squeal. Eels are burrowing out of the corpse, desperate to find a way back to the river. I also take ten paces back.

A whoreshriek from the bows of the container boat-sailors are a specialized market that my mother and I don’t touch-then silence, save for the ring of iron-shod heels. A short stocky uniformed figure with ramrod back and voluminous chest emerges from the dark beyond and marches toward us until he is standing in a pool of light shed by a small lamp hanging from a ship’s cable. I slowly get to my feet, close my hands in a wai, and raise them to my lips.

“Good evening, General Zinna,” I say, carefully maintaining the wai.

Without replying, the General walks slowly toward me and stares down at the corpse. “Someone exercised compassion,” he says in a whispered baritone. “They killed him before they shoved the eels up his ass. That way he didn’t feel them eating his guts out. I doubt I would show such restraint toward someone who really irritated me. Know what I mean?” He raises a hand, and snaps his fingers once. There is a sound of running boots; now more than a dozen young men in black sweatshirts and army haircuts are emerging from the shadows at a jog. They stand behind him in military formation until he nods to two of them, who go over to Chaz to shine a flashlight on his belly, which is now quite eaten away with a tangle of white writhing worms. The General walks over, picks one of the eels out of Chaz’s guts, deftly kills it by whipping its head against the capstan, and returns to me.

As he slides the dead eel into my trouser pocket, in hardly more than a murmur: “Tell Colonel Vikorn he’s gone too far. He framed me, I got off, now the dope belongs to me. He doesn’t get a second shot. I’ll have his guts, one way or another.” Casting a contemptuous glance at Lek: “And I’ll have your bum boy, too.”

He and his men turn and leave. We are alone in marine darkness with a corpse full of hungry eels. As if sensing the coast is clear, the girl at the bow of the ship shrieks and laughs again with impressive professionalism calculated to make her sailor feel powerful, predatory, irresistible, charming, and horny. It seems a secret party is under way, for a couple more girls cry out, laugh, make vulgar jokes in Thai while their men shout in Chinese. Three female faces appear over the bows, then immediately disappear.

Sudden quiet, in which the soft padding of a large rat can be heard. Far off someone is crossing the river in a long-tail boat. I decide to save the man I once interrogated from further forensic indignity, but it is not easy. He’s heavy and elusive in the way of corpses. Grasping his wrists and signaling for Lek to help me, I drag him to the side of the dock, twist him around, then try to push him in. Lek leans over from the hips, elegantly failing to grasp the cadaver’s feet. I’m sweating in the night heat and experiencing an irrational reluctance to make contact with the eels, which are still feasting. With a foot on one shoulder, near the neck, I give a mighty shove. His arms still outstretched, the tattoos Mother and Denise are the last of him to slide over the edge and into the river with the most discreet of splashes.

I reach into my pocket and throw Zinna’s dead eel after him. Where’s Lek? Frantic for a second (I experience a vision of rape and degradation at the hands of Zinna’s men), I catch sight of him a little farther down the dock, in a pool of light.

The most classic of all our classical dance derives from the Hindu Ramayana, in which the god Vishnu incarnates as Rama and gets into a fight with evil over the life of his bride Sita. Lek is playing Sita on her knees pleading for her lord and master to believe in her eternal fidelity.

I put my arm around him as I lead him away. “He called me a bum boy.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not a bum boy, I’m a dancer.”

“I know you are.”

He turns his big hazel eyes onto me, merciless in his trust, love, and expectation.

When we pass the spot, we hear the ferocious churning of fish and eels that the T808 is feeding. For a tantalizing moment I see his life disperse into its many components, which spin away from one another into the night. The composite problem that was Chaz Buckle is now resolved.

24

It seems, though, that other composites are resolving into dust and spirit this violent night. Just after I’ve dropped Lek off at his project, Lieutenant Manhatsirikit calls me on my mobile.

“The Colonel’s at Khun Mu’s house. Better get over there.”

There’s nothing much to say, farang, that you have not already guessed. At Khun Mu’s house all the dogs and monkeys are dead (gutted), the guards executed, mostly by bullets to the skull. Khun Mu, naked, is wrapped around Joey’s embalmed corpse in an obscene position, her throat cut. And there is a fat dead farang woman in her mid-forties slit from gut to chest, lying on the king-size bed in the great bedroom, wearing only a huge pair of shorts.

“Denise?” I ask Vikorn.

He nods. “She lived in a million-dollar mansion overlooking the Andaman Sea in Phuket. He kidnapped her and brought her here just to show that he could.” A shaking of the head. “Just to make a point.” Looking at me: “All our witnesses are dead.”

Vikorn walks over to the sofa by the window and sits heavily. I’ve never seen him so despondent. “We’ve been going against him symmetrically,” he mutters, “that’s the problem. We can’t beat him on violence. He’s the army, for Buddha’s sake.” A quick glance at me. “I’m sorry, Sonchai. I’m taking the file away from you.”

“You have someone better?”

“It needs nuance, a woman’s touch.”

“Manny? She’s not exactly subtle.”

He shrugs: no comment. He is huddled on his seat, shrunken, the very image of defeat; there are even tears in his eyes. I feel a great wave of pity-but wait! Somehow his projection of despair, frustration, misery, near-senility is a little too pat.

“Someone’s come up with a Plan C, haven’t they?”

He looks at me blankly as if he has no idea what I’m talking about.

At the station the next day, it is revealed that Vikorn spent the morning watching international news on his TV, which is normally dedicated to Thai pool. (He runs the main gambling syndicate.) When I go in to see him, I find him fixated by the monitor. It seems there has been a terrorist bomb in some remote village in Java, Indonesia, five Indonesian Hindus dead, about twenty more hospitalized. No one doubts the culprits are from an extreme Muslim faction, particularly because one of them died in the blast. Bits of his skullcap and beard, some fingers, a leg, and other body parts have been recovered. It is anticipated that his identity and that of the particular splinter group to which he belonged will soon be known. Naturally, the Western intelligence agencies are interested and only too willing to lend assistance.