45
Our love nest echoes with ghosts of love’s murmurs. I’m too devastated to move. Rooted to the spot, I experience an expanding vacuum in my chest that makes it difficult to breathe. Images of her likely mutilation flash across my brain. I loved her long before I knew her face or name. I am consciousness trapped in a pipe. Is there any need to explain? I never wanted anything before she illuminated my life. Now I cannot return to that pre-Chanya drabness, that routine of shadows. (Even the Buddha doesn’t glow like her.) I fear nothing except her loss. I hardly have the will to look at the new text message on my cell phone: Come alone, bring a million USD in nonsequential notes. Help me save her. The message ends with an address on the other side of town, just off Kaosan Road. I call Vikorn. A million U.S. is an oddly modest sum in the circumstances-he’ll send someone over with it immediately. “D’you want a team? We could just blow up the building.”
“Kill her, too?”
Vikorn grunts. “Have it your way. If you lose the fight, I’m going in with a hit squad, and she’ll have to take her chances. Fucking Chiu Chow.”
The money, thrown carelessly into a plastic bag, arrives in the company of a young constable who, from the look on his face, has been suitably terrorized by Vikorn.
But the roads are blocked with the usual traffic jam, which stretches all the way down Sukhumvit, shutting out even the side sois where traffic cannot enter the main stream. Serenity eludes me. I cannot meditate. I’m another helpless creature, just like all the other creatures, from ants to Einsteins, lashed by karma. By the time we arrive on the other side of town, my nerves are jumping, my eyes darting, the hand holding the money is shaking violently. My brain is full of un-Buddhist images of what I will do to them if they’ve started to work on her. At the same time, like any amateur I’m attempting to bribe the Buddha. I’m up to three hogs’ heads and a thousand eggs by the time we turn into Kaosan Road. As far as I can recall, even birth was less stressful.
Well, there’s nothing like the Buddha when it comes to anticlimax. The house is an old teak structure on stilts in the ancient Thai style. There are still a few left in the Kaosan area, mostly turned into guesthouses for nostalgia-hungry farang. This one has not been well maintained; it looks almost derelict with luscious weeds and other stubborn growths crowding out what must once have been a tropical garden. On the wall next to the front gate is a forlorn sign in Thai, English, and Japanese: TATTOOS. All the windows are shuttered. Parked in the road outside: a large metallic gray BMW with a driver waiting. At my knock the door immediately opens, a well-dressed Chinese man in his early thirties surveys me for a moment and allows his eyes to rest on the plastic bag, then bows slightly as he lets me in. He closes the door carefully behind him and points to the internal door, which leads to the great room that occupies the whole of the first floor.
For light we are dependent on knife-shaped shafts that penetrate the teak shutters and carve out brilliant elongated forms on the floor and furniture. Some of the light pierces the gloom of the walls, which I now see, with the expansion of my pupils, is chockablock with paintings, geometric designs, and grotesquely enlarged photographs of tattooed bodies both male and female, most of them naked save for the ink. The walls are so extraordinary, they quite eclipse the humans who sit below them. I think Gauguin’s hut on Tahiti was like this. Here in this big old space the tattooist has let his imagination run riot. And what an imagination! Influences from the great Hokusai to Hieronymus Bosch to Warhol to Van Gogh to Picasso to graffiti on the Tokyo subway: Ishy’s art is as eclectic as a magpie, but somehow, in the great heaping of color and shape, he has managed an appalling coherence. The walls are an extension of his own tattoos: extraordinary, intense, compelling, and ultimately incomprehensible, the product of a wild genius compelled at risk of madness to say: I am.
When my eyes drop to the sunken table, I wonder if I have not misunderstood the situation and clumsily stumbled onto a business meeting. Each of the seven Chinese is dressed in a business suit and tie, save for one man in his forties who is perhaps the chief negotiator and sports an open-necked shirt under his cashmere jacket. The floor has been dropped to accommodate legs and feet under the table in the old style, but from the other side of the room it looks like a congregation of dwarfs sitting on the floor around a long teak dining table below walls decorated by a mad god. A long shaft of light illuminates Ishy, who sits at the head in a splendid white linen open-neck shirt that reveals a wedge of his tattoos, with the inevitable bottle of sake in front of him. Chanya, in a silk shawl the color of old gold, sits next to him in near darkness. When I approach, she explains in a grumble: “They gave me an anesthetic. I can’t feel my tits.” To emphasize the point, she massages them with both hands. Without a word I walk to the head of the table with the plastic bag, which I dump in front of Ishy. Everyone stares at the bag, but no one grabs the money. What have I interrupted here? Finally Ishy clears his throat. I think he must have been drinking heavily, for there is no stutter.
“Unfortunately, it’s no longer as simple as that.”
“A pardonable misunderstanding, no one’s fault,” the Chinese in the open-necked shirt mutters, flashing me a ghostly smile. “But it will have to be cleared up one way or another.”
Ishy engages my eyes. “It seems the million is in respect of Chanya’s tattoo only. They were going to cut it out and cure it. Imagine, a million for just that little dolphin. I could have been rich if I’d had more time.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“They were assuming they could just take the other tattoos to sell on the black market. There’s quite a demand for my work now, mostly in Japan among the yakuza, who use them as status symbols-the way Japanese businessmen used to keep Van Goghs in safes and only take them out at bragging time. It’s quite depressing for an artist who wants exposure. After all, Van Gogh’s financial problems are over.”
“Where are the other tattoos?”
“Upstairs. The most recent are still being cured. Did you know the process is identical to that for pigskin?”
“How long has this-ah-trade been going on?”
“It’s a long story. You could say Mitch Turner was the first. I never intended it to get out of hand like this. I didn’t really intend to kill anybody except him.” He gives a matter-of-fact flick of the hand in Chanya’s direction. “I couldn’t have her, but I couldn’t stand any other man to have her either. You would have been next. But if one is going to kill, why miss the opportunity to make a profit? I’ve coveted that creamy white flesh of yours since the night we met, especially on your back.”
I had already guessed all this, of course. Standing quite still about six feet from the table, speaking like a man calling across a valley, my voice echoing in the cavernous room, I say: “So why can’t they take the other tattoos, cured and uncured?”
Ishy shakes his head at my obtuseness. “Because I’ve mortgaged them to the Japs already. The yakuza loan sharks. They’re sending a team with a lawyer. Should be here any minute. With the Italian.” At my baffled glance: “My dear fellow, you didn’t expect a war, did you, in this day and age? I called the Japs with the full agreement of Mr. Chu.”
“That is correct,” confirms the Chinese in the open-necked shirt, speaking in a monotone. “We’re all part of the global business community. It would be unfortunate if this little contractual matter were to come between us when we have so much trade with our Japanese colleagues. It would be unthinkable for us simply to take the works away, now that we are aware of a possibly prior and more lawful claim. I’m afraid Mr. Ishy is too much of an artist to trouble himself with legal niceties. He has mortgaged everything at least twice.” A pained smile. “That is the problem.”