I step inside the cell, which is to say I step inside the psychology of its inmate: a meltdown at the center. Reaching out with open hand, I grab the hair at the back of his head and pull him away from the bars. He is shivering and twitching like a rabbit. I have to caress his head and face to calm him down. The bruise under his left eye is healing well but has turned dark. Now he’s looking at me with helpless eyes. I grab a chair and sit directly opposite him on his bunk.
“Why are you here, Dan?”
A blink. The challenge of verbal communication is lifting him from a mood that is sustainable only in solitude. It is, of course, exactly solitude combined with classic Thaicopparanoia that has broken him. He blurts and blabbers at first.
“Why am I here? Because you put me here. Because you’re a Thai cop who’s found a fall guy and doesn’t give a damn about truth, or justice, or freedom, or democracy. You’re all about sending me to death row so you can get on with the next case. So I ran away, and now you have an even better excuse.”
“You know a lot about the Thai system of justice?”
Bitterly: “I’ve been here four years, man. I’ve seen a lot. You don’t have a justice system.”
“If it’s so dreadful, why are you in Thailand?”
Suddenly: an avalanche of words that must have accumulated in his feverish brain during the couple of days he’s been down here. His tongue races to keep up with the thoughts:
“I’m here because there is no such thing as rehabilitation in the free world: one criminal conviction and you’re out, no jobs above subsistence level for you. I’m here because marriage doesn’t work. I’m here because I’m bald and almost middle aged-sounds silly, but I haven’t come across a single Thai girl who gives a damn if I’m thirty or forty, bald or not, divorced or not. You’re a nonjudgmental people, and it’s taken me four years to find out why. You’ve got a massive underground hell called the prison system that devours anyone who falls off the tightrope. It’s amazing, it’s the most outrageous institution in the world. It isn’t really a prison service -it’s a Stone Age money factory owned and run by cops and prosecutors. No one is safe. It could happen to anyone, Thai or farang, male or female, old or young: you’re walking down a quiet street one night, a cop emerges from nowhere, plants an Ecstasy or yaa baa pill on you, and takes you off to jail. You have a choice: pay his fee for freeing you, or watch the system gobble up the whole of the rest of your life. In your society there is only one judgment to be made: has he fallen into the pit or not?”
“This pit-does it have a way out?”
“I don’t have the money to pay you to let me go. I just don’t have it.” Looking me in the eye: “I didn’t kill her.”
I nod gnomically. “Suppose I tell you you’ve lucked out with the one cop in Bangkok who doesn’t take money? Suppose I tell you I really am interested in finding out what happened to Damrong?”
I guess I should not have used her name in that tone. It causes him to flash me a look. An idea is slowly rising to the top of his mind. “How would I know that?”
“You were married to her, you two had been business associates- to some extent you still were. Maybe she confided in you more than anyone else. Maybe you didn’t kill her but have a shrewd idea about why she had to die.”
I think the choice of phrase why she had to die was quite serendipitous. It seems to have triggered some internal narrative that takes him off into another space. Finally he says, “Did she have to die? You haven’t told me how it happened.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t know. You haven’t even told me when she died.” Looking me in the eye again: “When did she die, exactly?”
“Good question,” I admit. “But not strictly relevant. Thanks to technology, many things can be done by remote control today that needed a hands-on approach in more primitive times.”
Now he is assessing me in a different way. Now he is more scared than ever. I was fishing, though, and have no idea why my words should have had such a profound effect. The expression on his face is of a drowning man. I shift my chair a little closer. “Tell me,” I say softly, “tell me. Maybe I can help.”
A shrug. “Help? I’m between a rock and a hard place. You let me out today, I’d be lucky to even make it to the airport.”
I nod sagely, then abandon the chair to stand up and pace a little while I speak. “I see. So you weren’t supposed to keep those clips on your laptop. Am I right?”
Shaking his head in wonder at my understatement: “Yeah, you could say that.”
“So why keep them there?”
“Knee-jerk opportunism. It’s been a problem all my life. Great tactics, no strategy worth a dime. It was dumb. I’ve been beating myself up ever since. Discipline is what I don’t have. If I did, I’d be rich and free.”
“You thought having the clips might give you leverage one day when you needed it?”
“Right.”
“Do you know who the Thai Chinese player is?”
“Not exactly. Someone big. Ajao paw.”
“Yes, a godfather. You could say that. You weren’t supposed to keep him on your hard disk, so I suppose the drill was for you to set up the cameras, record onto a DVD, and give it to her so she could choose when and how to turn on the screws. Why did you disobey orders?”
Looking away: “Who trusts anyone in this town?” A pause, then: “I didn’t think about it all that clearly. Like you say, I was looking for leverage.”
“You took a great risk for an illusory security. Fear? Yes, I can see how that might work. Perhaps you were too used to her tantrums, her shifts of plan, her sadistic way of playing on your heartstrings. Yes, I can see how the revelation that you have kept a life-threatening record of her performance with a jao paw might swing things your way at a crucial moment in time. And there was the Englishman too. I guess she must have been blackmailing him?”
He shrugs. “Some yuppie jerk who kept his brains in his dick. No great challenge. Especially not for her.”
I place a finger against my nose, not for the posture but because I’m torn between two paths. I know the Englishman has twice been to look for him at his apartment over the past few days until one of the guards divulged that Baker was in jail. Instinct chooses reticence. I cough and change the subject. “The jao paw, though -he was different?”
He almost sniggers. “I’ve never seen her even slightly nervous before. She was with him, though. You saw the clip. She pulled out all the stops for him. I’ve filmed her working a hundred times-I never saw her perform like that before.” Giving me a suddenly less fearful look: “Send me down. I’m not buying into your game. You can’t scare me the way he can, whoever he is.” His jaw is set, his mind made up.
What I have to say next will cost me a lot, but I find I don’t have a lot of choice.
“She wasn’t a woman, she was a disease,” I say, still pacing, “a disease that infected the blood of half the men she ever serviced.” He raises his head to stare at me. “In her hands your body was a penny-whistle that she could play anything on. But it wasn’t what she did to your body alone, it was what she did to your heart-right? She knew how to set it on fire. She was an addiction worse than crack, worse than yaa baa-worse than heroin. Isn’t that the way you put it at our first meeting?” He seems to be daring me to carry on. I pace the cell, allowing my anguish to show. “How did she do it? Is the sex instinct in men really so all-powerful? Or are we talking about something else, I ask myself, something even more fundamental? Had she discovered something most women are only vaguely aware of? Had she found a way of suggesting, ever so subtly, that she could cure even the base anguish of being alive? That between her thighs you would find the peace you crave? That she actually understood you? The holy grail, in other words, that no man ever really finds?” I pause to stare at him. “Was it really the sex, Dan, that hooked you, or was it the surprising, uncanny way she had of soothing you, as if she understood your problem?”