Ishy shook his head. The people on his tail were ruthless and extremely good at what they did. He could not risk it. He simply could not bear to think of what they would do to her. The steps he took to cover his trail today had been elaborate to the point of baroque, but still he could not afford to feel secure. This was their last moment together. He was resolute, unshakable. He would go to the grave with the comfort that at least he’d managed to protect her.

Chanya is looking at me with the shrewd eyes of a woman who has experienced every shade of male jealousy. I lick my lips and swallow to cure the dryness in my throat. “It’s okay,” I croak. “I’m okay.”

“What d’you think? What’s going on in your heart right now?”

“Actually, I’m thinking about Mitch Turner.”

44

I’m surprised at how often I do think of him (whoever he was). There was no real malice in him, he never once used those formidable muscles in anger, and even his savage words in moments of fury with the woman he loved were mostly an expression of bewilderment: how did he fall for a girl like that anyway? But I think of him mostly because he wants me to. Last night I saw him as a Superman figure, trapped in a cube of deadly kryptonite, unable to use his strength, for he dared not touch the walls. But that, it turned out, was no more than a reflection of my own prejudice. A second later he was a humble fellow in T-shirt and jeans, smiling gently at my folly. Your back! I exclaimed. He pulled up his shirt and turned: a rectangle in the form of a picture frame, within which foreign words were written in a code I could never decipher. He shrugged: it didn’t matter to him anymore, he was merely trying to help me with the case.

I’m on the back of a motorbike again, playing Pisit’s talk show through my earphones while we weave in and out of the static commuter traffic. (Cars, buses, and trucks are the only objects not subject to the law of constant movement in this Buddhist city.) Chanya was fast asleep in our love den when I left her in response to Vikorn’s call: another T808. The old man finally seemed to be worried about something.

Well, Pisit is having a field day with the story of the abbot in Nonthaburi who had more than a hundred million baht in his bank account when he was gunned down last week. He quotes from The Nation’s short bio of the deceased monk: Thanks to his cleverness and knowledge of magic he quickly rose in the Sangha and was appointed abbot when he was thirty-seven years old.

Pisit, to Sangha spokesman: Is it common for ambitious monks to use magic as a promotion aid?

Spokesperson: Unfortunately, meditation brings many powers that are vulnerable to abuse.

Pisit: You mean like purple rain? Or hundreds of millions of baht?

Spokesperson: Buddhism has been fighting sorcery for two thousand five hundred years. Generally, we have an excellent success rate, but a few miscreants still slip through.

Pisit: The magic in this case seems to have worked through the mundane medium of drugs and sex. The rumor has it that the abbot was murdered because he double-crossed a certain army general.

Spokesman: Sorcery carries a heavy karmic price.

Pisit: Almost every Thai man learns to meditate in his early twenties. How much sorcery do you think we generate in this kingdom? I mean, how many of our most prominent figures in business and politics have got where they are today using dark powers?

Spokesman: We don’t have any statistics.

Pisit: But if you were to hazard a guess?

Spokesman: All of them.

The destination this merry morning is a magnificent mansion off Soi 22, Sukhumvit. Vikorn sits in the kitchen flirting with an attractive Thai woman in her mid-twenties while a corpse waits in the living room. Blood has flooded the capillaries in my Colonel’s face, which has acquired an obscene beam. He introduces his companion as Nok, and I can tell by the shape her mouth makes when she speaks to me that they have already fixed an assignation.

“You better tell him yourself,” Vikorn says. With a quite disgusting grin at her: “I don’t want to put words in your mouth.”

“I’m the maid here,” Nok says, standing up and leading me out of the kitchen. “When I arrived this morning, I found him like that. Naturally I called the police, and Colonel Vikorn himself arrived.”

The middle-aged Japanese male is naked on the polished pine floor in a crimson lake that has spread in a slow flood over sealed wood. Vikorn wanders in while I’m conducting a perfunctory examination of the corpse. The last segment of pinkie is missing from his left hand, a very old wound. I catch Vikorn’s eye when I turn him over.

Vikorn shakes his head. “You’ll have to stop this. Do whatever you need to do. Don’t arrest him-shoot him while he’s trying to escape. This has to stop.” A shrug. “At least this victim is not American so we don’t have to call the CIA.”

“You’re not going to tell them?”

“I’ve run out of hairs.”

I turn to Nok: “Please tell me what you know.”

“I came to work here a year ago,” Nok explains. “I was recruited by his wife, a Japanese woman with a personality problem. I mean, she never stopped complaining. She was obsessive about the house.” A wave of the hand: “This is all her.”

I take a moment to look around. The place could not be more Japanese: sliding screens of translucent paper, a small nonsymmetrical pool in the middle of the room (in which a severed penis floats) surrounded by pebbles, bonsai in beige glazed pots, and carefully wrinkled natural-colored paper on the walls.

“I had to learn the Japanese names for everything. It took me ages with her bitching at me all the time-the place had to be spotless. Then, just when she had everything perfect, she dumped him and fled back to Japan, said she couldn’t stand Thailand, that we were all primitive, dirty, and revolting. Nips are worse racists than we are.”

“When did she go?”

“About two months ago. It didn’t seem to bother him very much. He had whores back here from time to time.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

Firmly: “No. He asked me to a couple of times, but I said I wasn’t like that.”

“If he’d offered something respectable, like the position of mia noi?”

“Well, he didn’t. He just wanted a cheap screw, and he wasn’t going to pay any more than he paid for his other women, so I said no.”

“You never saw him naked?”

“No.”

“Never saw his back without a shirt?”

“No.”

“Any enemies that you know of?”

Vikorn stands frowning over the cadaver. “Forget it,” he says to me. “This guy was the CEO of the Thai-Nippon Reforestation and Beautification of Isaan Corporation.”

I was bending over the body; now I straighten to stare at him. He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Zinna’s going to think you’re behind this.”

“I know. It’s one of those dreadful coincidences.” He does not seem overly worried about Zinna. “I don’t know what the connection is, really I don’t. This has nothing at all to do with me. What does it matter why when we know who?”

I exchange a nod with Vikorn.

“The forensic team will be here in a minute. I’ve got some urgent business on the other side of town,” I explain to the maid as I make for the door. Out on the street I take a motorbike taxi back to Chanya. On the way I finally hear my mobile bleep with a text message:

They’ve taken her. They want her tattoo.