“You know who she is?” I ask him.
He shrugs. What does it matter? She was just a whore from out of town, of no more consequence to him than a ball of fluff. She was not part of any war that interested him. I allow myself the luxury of dwelling on her face (that smile) for a few moments: no way Mustafa is going to read my heart, which I have to admit has sunk just a tad. I pull open the picture frame and take out the picture of Chanya, which I pocket.
Unable to follow up on the mystery of the picture, I examine that small stack of books on the bedside table. Huckleberry Finn, a black Bible, the biography of the FBI spy Robert Hanssen by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller, a translation into English of Dante’s Inferno, a copy of the Koran in English, The Encyclopedia of Arachnids, Advanced Spider Keeping, and Problems in Identification and Classification of Asian Arachnids. I flick through the vivid color plates: scorpions luminescent under ultraviolet light. I raise my eyes to Mustafa.
“He collected them, I forgot to tell you. At first we thought he was genuinely insane. We used to watch him crouching in dark alleys with some kind of little net and a bottle.”
The rest of the books are in Japanese script, indecipherable to both of us. One includes pictures, though, lithographic prints of samurai dueling with their famous curved swords. As I flick through the book, I see it is some kind of manual. There are photographs of samurai swords and diagrams that seem to show how one is made.
“He was fluent in Japanese,” Mustafa explains. “We think that was his main qualification, what got him into the CIA. He had Japanese friends.”
Finally, Mustafa gives way to the disgust that has been building since we entered the flat. “How can children like this hope to lead the world? Look at the books, at his life. This was a thirty-year-old teenager, a consumer kid taking culture off a supermarket shelf: samurai stuff from Japan, a whore from Bangkok, a little Christianity here, a little Islam there, when he wasn’t hunting for spiders or smoking opium.” He looks about to spit.
“Smoking opium?”
He grunts, unwilling to say more.
I follow him around the rest of the flat while he throws glances of contempt into odd corners. We find the terrarium on a shelf against a back wall in the spare bedroom. Mustafa peers at it, then shakes his head. “Nobody fed them.” I peer into the rectangular space behind the glass: dried corpses of hairy tarantulas, a scorpion with babies on her back, other spiders dead in their webs as if in the aftermath of a cataclysm.
In a cupboard Mustafa finds a cheap telescope of the kind that can be bought in department stores. Our exchange of glances is a classic example of telepathy. If Mitch Turner needed a good telescope, he would have persuaded the CIA to supply a state-of-the-art model. So he used this one for what?
“Checking out the action around the police station,” Mustafa grunts.
There doesn’t seem to be anything else of immediate significance, nothing that would explain Mitch Turner’s violent death anyway. I observe that there is no laptop, but Mustafa says whenever Turner left the apartment for any length of time, he took a laptop with him, probably following standing orders to check it into a bank vault or safe-deposit box. Well, there doesn’t seem to be much more we can do tonight, so we leave the apartment and Mustafa locks the door.
Out on the street the night is in full swing. The whole town is alive with disco music and flashing neon signs from cheap hotels. A tall and very thickset Malay in his late thirties is ushering three girls into his hotel as we pass. Three? I shoot a glance at Mustafa, but he’s in whatever space he uses to block out unacceptable aspects of reality. I wonder if he saw them at all, those three very attractive girls who seemed to be enjoying themselves? I guess that within his superstition those women would be seen as pure evil, seductive emissaries of Satan. Well, looks like that Malay and those girls are going to be merrily rolling in it for the next few hours, after which all participants will retire satisfied and sleep the sleep of the just. I do not explain to Mustafa that in the Game women often prefer to share their labor-they may even see it as a kind of perk in that they demand extra for doing less. It’s more fun, too, if you have a friend or colleague to chat with in your own language while you’re working the john. For country girls there’s an echo from the rice harvest, when everyone has to pitch in, and there’s a lot of chatting and flirting and you tell jokes to pass the time, hardly noticing what your hands are doing. I think of the big dark Malay laid out like a rice paddy while the girls work him and discuss the dollar-baht exchange rate across his erection. I pity Mustafa, who so resolutely rejects the simple dance of life, the humor. At the same time I wonder how Mitch Turner, the confused American spy, took it all.
There don’t seem to be any cafés with spare tables and chairs, not with any privacy anyway, so we end up in the lobby of our hotel, which has been transformed into a kind of anteroom for a gigantic brothel. Girls are sitting on all the sofas, and as we watch, dark-skinned young men with pencil mustaches approach one or another. They are different from farang in that the deal is done so quickly, usually within five minutes. No romantic buildup, more an Asian-style business deal. The woman is happy enough with that, since it might mean she can fit in more than one customer tonight. Some of the couples start immediately for the lifts, but most wander out into the street in search of a disco, where the young gallant can demonstrate his expertise in karaoke and the lady will applaud with adulation in her eyes.
Mustafa doesn’t want to look at it, so we find an empty table in a corner. He still has some explaining to do, so I give him the silent treatment.
“You are wondering why we took such interest in one individual, when there are hundreds like him in Thailand?”
“Yes.”
“You must ask my father for a full explanation. According to him, the farang Mitch Turner was a fascinating product of the West. He said that just as intelligence agencies like to take terrorist bombs apart to see how they are made, so we should look into the soul of this strange fish, this human bomb, to see how it was made. After all, he didn’t invent himself-he was a creature of his culture.”
“His naÏveté, confusion, lack of center?”
“All those things, but what most interested my father was his spiritual agony. You must understand that although my father is very learned, he hardly ever meets farang, especially not American spies. My father is a great imam, which is to say a connoisseur of souls. Mitch Turner interested him a lot. Until he met Turner, I think he doubted that farang had souls. When he saw what a mess Turner was in, what he called the ‘great howl of agony’ at the center of this man, he felt he’d understood why the West is the way it is.” A ghost of a smile. “It was as if he’d cracked a code and now could read the Western mind.” Staring into my eyes: “He told me he would never have believed it was possible for a man to be so tormented and still live, still function.” Excited now, sharing a passion with me for the first time: “He also said that without a war, America would descend into total confusion and would have to turn itself into a police state to survive, because its people no longer have any internal structure. Americans can never be defeated by war. It is peace they find intolerable.”