A hostile look from Jones. “You want to know? I got tired of being invisible in this damn town. Girls have egos, that’s the main message of the twenty-first century, so better get used to it.”
“You weren’t turning any heads?”
A smoldering pause. “I don’t entirely blame the Western men over here. I met Nape’s wife last night. She’s stunning and walks like her parents paid a million dollars for comportment classes. But then, most of the women here move like that, don’t they? Even the ones with no education at all.”
“Have the haircut and the T-shirt helped?”
“Nope. Can we talk about you now?”
“I’m a career inadequate. Ask my Colonel. In ten years I’ve made no useful contribution to the force.”
“You feel guilty about not taking bribes?”
“You must understand, the Royal Thai Police Force has always been way ahead of its time. It’s run like a modern industry, every cop is a profit center.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that. I guess a cop enjoys immunity from prosecution for just about everything, right?”
I have to think about that one. “Cops giving evidence against cops in open court would not be good for the esprit de corps. Transgressions are dealt with internally.”
“Oh yeah? What happens to the bad apples, they’re barred from taking bribes for a week?”
“Something like that, unless they’re really bad.” I’ve piqued her interest. She smells blood and a damn good story for the guys back home.
“C’mon, let me have it, what medieval punishment for the ones who really piss off the colonels?”
“Mandatory suicide,” I mutter. “We are a gentlemanly service and extreme transgressors are expected to act like men, after due process.”
“A kangaroo court?”
An image flashes before my mind. I’m not the type who is normally invited to these secret proceedings. It has only happened to me once: a somber mood in a large bare room full of chairs, cops of all ranks selected from every district in Krung Thep, a very scared sergeant sitting in the defendant’s chair, a small table in front of him with a service revolver and a glass of water. I want to change the subject. “It’s not all bad. Take a young farang who’s caught with some ganja. He pays five thousand baht to the cop who caught him, which is a reasonable sum. He gets off with a lesson and a fright. If he were prosecuted and sent to jail in Bang Kwan, his life would certainly be ruined. He would risk all kinds of diseases, probably incur a serious drug addiction. Our system is humane and compassionate. It is also cost effective. The cop receives a bonus without any extra burden on the taxpayer. Police salaries have been at starvation level forever.”
Jones cannot decide if I’m serious or not. “Well, that’s a long way from the American viewpoint. It’s a given that our laws are applied evenly to every citizen-the alternative is total sleaze.”
“In that case, why aren’t we investigating Sylvester Warren?”
Her head snaps away and she is looking out the window. “Cute, aren’t you?”
A long silence. Finally, she slowly turns her head back toward me. “Actually, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Only don’t tell anyone.”
32
We are sliding past the American embassy on Wireless Road in moderate traffic, heading toward Lumpini. Jones and I both spare a glance at the thick white walls. It was the King’s birthday a few days ago, and one of the gates to the embassy carries a banner which reads LONG LIVE THE KING. It’s the kind of touch we appreciate from Uncle Sam.
Jones shifts her gaze away from the embassy. “Every time anyone dusts off the file on Warren, Warren himself gets to hear about it. Pressure and heat. Memos and e-mails demanding to know why resources are being wasted on a case consisting of innuendo and gossip. Once a station chief was shifted sideways. But we have our cops of integrity, just like you. A small team is secretly dedicated to the Warren case. That’s why I’m here. Rosen doesn’t know, neither does Nape. They think I screwed up somewhere and got myself a punishment posting. That’s fine. That’s what I want them to think. So don’t you open your mouth. I’m telling you because you’re going to help me. I’ve spent a chunk of my career on this and it’s going to get me promotion. I know all about Warren and his jade.”
“Tell me.”
“Does the name Barbara Hutton mean anything to you? How about Woolworth? Her daddy built the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan until Chrysler went higher. The Sassoons? They were very big in Shanghai before the Chinese revolution. The list is almost endless and includes Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Edda Ciano, who was Benito Mussolini’s daughter, Edwina Mountbatten, the mother of the Queen of England, all the way up to Henry Pu Yi. You’ve heard of him?” I shake my head. “Better known as the last Emperor of China.” A reverent pause. “What do all these people have in common? They were major players in global finance before anyone called it that. They were the swinging thirties, the roaring forties. And they started a new fashion in gems. Before them only the Chinese and a few Western specialists really appreciated jade. After them, if you didn’t have at least a few pieces of ‘the stone of heaven’ to flash at dinner parties, you didn’t get invited to the dinner parties. Of course, they’re all dead now, or too old to care about jade, but jade was their passion, it was a common theme. You can’t look into their private lives without it leaping out at you. And they all have heirs, who are pretty damned old themselves.
“You may as well know that Warren studied under someone called Abe Gump. He was an antique dealer in San Francisco who got interested in Oriental art when all his Italian marble, French clocks and just about everything else was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. He was blind but one hell of a connoisseur. He was a legend in the thirties for being able to value a piece of jade just by feeling it. He was Barbara Hutton’s tutor when she wanted to learn about jade.
“So when the great families of the prewar period came out of the war and the various communist revolutions relatively poor, perhaps even destitute, they thought about selling their jade to people like Abe Gump and then later to Sylvester Warren. There’s an old Chinese proverb: Better to invest than to work, better to hoard than invest. You’ve probably heard it? Well, Sylvester Warren learned that lesson. He’s one hell of a hoarder. But even hoarders have to know when to sell. You might say a signal flashed around the world to all jade hoarders in September 1994 when Barbara Hutton’s jadeite wedding necklace was sold at auction in Christie’s Hong Kong for U.S.$4.3 million. Madame Chiang Kai-shek made a bid but lost. She wanted the necklace for her hundredth birthday. She bid by telephone from her apartment in Gracie Square on the Upper East Side. All of a sudden jade was the biggest news again in the gem industry, but with one catch. The necklace was imperial jade, the highest quality that exists, from the Kachin Hills in Burma, and could be traced back to the Forbidden City. Without that cachet, the stones might not have fetched a tenth of that amount. It’s like Elvis Presley’s guitar. Without the illustrious pedigree it’s just a very good secondhand guitar.”