I tell Chanya to get the hell out while she still can, even though these men seem to pose no threat to her and indeed have more or less ignored her since they cut their deal. Am I protecting her, or is there some other motive? Perhaps I’m ashamed of my morbid curiosity. Perhaps I don’t want her to see how fascinated I am by what will happen next. (Maybe I don’t want to see how fascinated she might be.) I take her to the door, kiss her, and push her away. By the time I have returned, the drug is already taking effect-Ishy is losing control of his legs. The surgeon barks orders in Japanese, and five men immediately surround the artist and lower him gently onto the long table. Already he has lost all control over his body, there is no connection between his mind and his nerves, but light remains in those unblinking eyes. I would love to know what he’s thinking.
Under the direction of the Italian, the surgeon makes some deft strokes with a scalpel from armpits to hips and along the length of the underarms. He makes light circular incisions at the ankles and wrists and along the length of the penis. With quite astonishing speed, assisted by the Italian and one other man, they unpeel him. As with any masterpiece, the Italian carefully rolls up the hide to take it upstairs for curing. All the others follow, leaving me alone in the cavernous room with his brilliantly colored work glowing from the walls, while Ishy, finally naked, presides inscrutably over his own slow dying.
SEVEN. Plan C
47
Well, we’ve received the final official lab results,” Elizabeth Hatch says in that level, hypercontrolled way of hers. Nevertheless, she casts a slightly sheepish glance at me. (I have my spies: I heard on the grapevine she went on another tour last night and ended up with the same girl. This could be love-I have a feeling she’ll be back.) “It seems the DNA is identical in the Stephen Bright and the Mitch Turner case. The only problem: the DNA, according to our database, belongs to the terrorist Achmad Yona, who was killed in the bomb blast in Samalanga in Indonesia a few weeks before Bright.”
“So he killed Mitch Turner, died in the bomb blast, came back to kill Stephen,” Hudson says.
I’m not totally convinced of an ironic intention. The conversation, in the CIA’s suite at the Sheraton, possesses the surreal quality of a rehearsal. These two officers will be filing their own individual reports, of course; this is a practice session.
“So you narrow down the possibilities. One, Achmad Yona had nothing to do with any of the slayings. He distributed hair from his beard and two of his fingers to colleagues in order to create a red herring and/or to enhance his reputation. Two, Yona did both killings and the DNA evidence found at the Indonesian bomb blast was a plant.”
“The way to handle it,” Hudson declares, straightening his back (he has miraculously mutated into Paper Warrior First Class), “is to play down the Indonesia thing. So they found DNA belonging to him in that bomb blast-so what? They burned all the other remains before we could get to them, so we don’t know for sure what they actually found, if anything. We can’t rely on the Indonesians to play totally straight with us. They’re Muslim, after all-under the skin they’re not totally unsympathetic to the radical cause.”
“That’s it,” agrees Elizabeth. “We finesse the Indonesia thing into a footnote.”
“That’s the way to play it,” from Hudson.
The two suddenly remember my presence. “Oh, we brought you over here because we wanted to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymnbook.” Elizabeth smiles. “Anything we’ve said so far inconsistent with your understanding of what went on?”
Tired of lying for Vikorn and suddenly haunted by an image of Mustafa and his father, I experience a reckless, liberating, and profoundly Buddhist compulsion to tell the truth. “Actually, Mitch Turner and Stephen Bright were killed by a mad Japanese, a tattooist with a terrible personality problem who confessed before he died. The killings had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”
I am more than a little curious at the effect this bombshell will have on these two professionals. Which only goes to show I’m not so smart; I should have remembered that farang inhabit a parallel universe. The two suffer from a moment of collective deafness. Or are they embarrassed? Third-world cops do come out with the most ridiculous crap after all.
“Well, that’s great,” says Elizabeth after a long moment when no one looks me in the eye. “We can report that local law enforcement agrees with our initial report.” She gives me one of her superior-librarian looks as I make for the exit. “I know his Colonel sees it our way, too.”
When I glance back from the door, Hudson mouths an apologetic explanation: “GS Eleven.”
The Sheraton is only a short walk from our primitive love nest. We should probably have moved out by now, Chanya and I, but we’ve both got used to being what we really are: a couple of third-world peasants grabbing a sweet moment, favoring quality of life above standard of living. We’re both particularly fond of the big water trough in the backyard, where we wash each other down like elephants. She has to cook in the yard, too, and I’ve become fond of watching her pounding chiles with the mortar and pestle wearing nothing but a sarong. A couple of beers, the odd spliff, the sounds of the street at night while we cuddle up under the fan-what more could a sane man want?
Well, there is just one gigantic loose end that troubles me. I wait for the moment-we’ve just made love, and Chanya, who has morphed into traditional Thai wife, goes to bring the beer from the cooler. I clear my throat. She glances at me. I’m tilting my head in the cutest possible imitation of a question mark. She’s way too smart not to get the point. She puts the bottle down next to my arm, goes to rummage in one of her bags that she dumped in a corner of the room, and returns with a late-model IBM ThinkPad. My eyes turn to saucers while she expertly switches it on, connects the modem to our landline, and types in a code.
In a sweet tone: “What is your question, exactly?”
I stare at the screen while Windows XP Edition radiates its deep blue glow and those stupid Windows icons spread like a virus. “Vikorn. Why exactly was he so keen to protect you after Mitch’s death? I’ve never seen him like that before. He even flew to Indonesia. Did you sleep with him?”
She scowls. “Of course not. He was just terrified that if the CIA interrogated me, I’d spill the beans and Zinna would have him run out of town.”
“How did you get this?” I tap the IBM.
“Mitch checked it into a safe box in the hotel he was staying at when Ishy killed him. I took the key when I left the room because I knew he would have some opium in the safe box. I took the ThinkPad at the same time.”
“You better tell me what really happened, just in case there’s something I need to finesse with the CIA.”
“Sure,” she says as she works the keys. Now we’re out of Windows, into a dire warning of how the U.S. government will systematically hunt down and wreck the lives of anyone and everyone entering this supersecret database without authority.
“It goes like this,” Chanya says.
The scene is Mitch’s apartment in Songai Kolok in the early days, quite some time before Ishy arrived to complicate their lives, the time of day about three in the afternoon. After watching Mitch slip into opium heaven-much to her relief, since he had been particularly tense on this visit-Chanya had pottered contentedly around. No doubt about it, there was something rather special about their relationship, particularly when the White Tornado was deeply opiated. He was stark naked on the bed, and she liked to have his amazing body in the best perspective. Once, wickedly, she placed a cotton towel over his head and imagined what his face would have been like if it had mirrored the beauty of his body. She found a tiny American flag in one of his drawers and stuck it in his hand, spending some time on getting the fist to clench. Out of curiosity she tried working his penis; the erectile tissue was off chasing dragons.