He shakes his head. “Grow up, Sonchai. I took your delicate little heart into account and fingered the Indonesians. None of your new friends in Songai Kolok is implicated. You should be pleased.”
When I call Mustafa, I make the same point. “But he blamed Muslims,” he says, and hangs up.
30
In case you didn’t get it, farang, that was the end of the Main Plot. (You remember, the Cover-up-but don’t worry, I feel a Coda coming on.) Vikorn did not, of course, expect to be believed with his cock-and-bull story, but as we all know, that is not the way the intelligence industry operates. Belief is for choirboys. What you need (apparently) is a fantastically complicated and enticing distraction that will make it quite impossible for anyone to draw a conclusion one way or the other but at the same time will offer itself as a vehicle for promotion. (I don’t need to tell you this, farang. I think you invented this game, no?) I guess Chanya is safe for a couple of decades while they mull it over. Doesn’t Vikorn just take your breath away sometimes?
As a consequence, things are a little slow here, but just at the moment I’m rather fascinated by the homely family atmosphere that has been developing at the club this past week, thanks to Hudson and Bright.
Bright first. Nat reports to my mother, who reports to me, that he’s quite a good boy really. Nat’s challenge to his virility punched a nice big hole through his ego, and with the ensuing flood of light we now have a brand-new picture of dear Steve, who fell apart immediately after coitus on the third date and confessed that he’s not the great tough larger-than-life patriot he appears to be (You’re not? exclaimed Nat with an expression of shock; No, he admitted in a tone that recognized that some people would find that hard to believe); au contraire, as Truffaut used to say, the poor young fellow is all bent out of shape from a particularly ugly divorce in which she made the usual baseless allegations of abuse in order to get the house, the car, and the bank account and full custody of his toddler daughter, with only supervised access for him.
We watched while he went through a schizophrenic period when he was not at all sure whether he should keep up appearances or not (or whom he should keep them up for; I myself was treated to a testosteronic strut and a sad droopy shamble in the space of an hour), but I’m happy to report that thanks to Thai therapy, he did not take more than a week to return to the human family and now he arrives every night on the dot at eight, pays Nat’s bar fine, and takes her upstairs, where she rewards him with an orgasm including all bells and whistles. (We can hear her in the bar if we turn the system down. Bright knows this, of course, because Hudson told him, but cured of hubris by my country and my women, the dear lad reappears after his heroic coupling with no more than a grateful beam on his square Nordic features.) Nat asked me to ask Vikorn how much American spies get paid these days.
But Hudson, of course, is a different kettle of fish. Talk about many-layered (and multifaceted). I have to be humble here and admit I don’t know any Asian who could keep a column of oiled billiard balls in the air from day to day the way he does-or who would want to. In the finer points of mental self-abuse, farang lead the world. He does it all by remaining close-lipped and secretive, of course, which provided a challenge for my mother, the courting of whom has been so unobtrusive-and secretive-that no one knows if they’ve actually done it yet-or even if he is actually courting her or not. (Nong turns uncharacteristically coy whenever I challenge her on the point, which is more than academic to me considering how close we are now to the visit from Superman. I wouldn’t put it past her to use Hudson in order to get back in form for Dad-or vice versa, depending on what sort of shape Dad is in after all these years. She hasn’t resumed her diet yet, which is certainly a clue of some kind, if indecipherable at the time of writing.) No, my mother has been no use at all in the Hudson study, and I have had to build on what I’ve been able to glean during those very brief and few moments when he has let his guard down. See if you can work it out, farang. He:
1. Brightened once when he heard Wan and Pat talking in their native tongue, which is Lao;
2. Spared a glance which was neither negative nor judgmental when one of the old codgers inadvertently flashed a large bag of dope in the bar one night;
3. Has found it necessary to interview Vikorn unaccompanied by Bright or any interpreter on numerous occasions, which seemed to leave both he and Vikorn in good spirits;
4. Is fifty-six years old;
5. Joined the CIA in his early twenties and was sent to Laos after graduating from the academy.
Oh, and there’s a sixth point. In a quiet moment in the bar one evening, when I was forlornly checking the e-mail for signs of Superman, he leaned over my shoulder.
“Want to do a deal? I’ll tell you something you need to know if you put in a good word for me with your mum.”
“Fuck off. I don’t pimp for my mother.”
“Sorry, that’s not at all what I meant. I admire her, I respect her. She makes me tingle in places I thought were dead. So I’ll tell you anyway. Listen. D’you really think Mitch Turner sat twiddling his thumbs all day down there in Songai Kolok without making any contribution at all to our glorious Agency?”
“I did wonder about that.”
“Of course you did, you’re a first-class cop in your own very unique way. So think about it. What do all members of the secret world have in common? We’re compulsive gossips, that’s what. And who can we gossip to? Only each other. Security clearance can be a pain in the ass. You’ve no idea what total junk most so-called intelligence really is. Now with encryption and e-mail, a guy with Turner’s clearance can listen in to every damn piece of trivia that our bugs and agents pick up all over Asia. An American woman mugged in Nepal, a dumb Yank gets into a brawl in downtown Tokyo, an American child abducted in Shanghai-stuff that shouldn’t be part of our work at all but still flashes across our screens.”
“Turner sat reading that junk? It doesn’t sound like him.”
“He had no choice. Intelligence sifting was part of his job. He would have to give an opinion on it all: valuable or not, if valuable how many stars? The whole game is basically as dumb as that. Because of the need for security clearance, guys with Ph.D.’s do stuff a schoolkid wouldn’t find challenging.” That thin smile of his starts to build. “Drugs too, of course. We still have to do a lot of narcotics work, the DEA are such dummies.”
I stare at him, not having the faintest idea where he’s going here.
He leans a little closer. “What the hell do you think she was doing with herself while he was stoned out of his brain on the opium she brought him? All she needed was his log-in code. He probably told her the number himself when he was on the dope. Opium can do that-you see the world from a whole different perspective, one hundred and eighty degrees different. Yes, I’ve had my moments.” I’ve stopped working the mouse. “She’s a very very smart lady. For supersmart street sense, Chanya’s the finest I’ve ever seen.” He lets the smile spread some more. “Put in a good word for me, and I’ll tell you more.”
“I don’t care.”
A chuckle as he grasps my shoulder in a manly grip. “You’re a lousy liar, and I love you for it.”
With the CIA apparently on my side, I take the opportunity to ask that question that never seems to go away: “Does the name Don Buri mean anything to you?” He looks convincingly blank and shakes his head.
Later that night, with Hudson gone and the bar almost empty, Su emerges from one of the upstairs rooms with something in her hand.