A grunt from Vikorn. “The victim is a muckraking journalist based here and employed by some Japanese environmentalist group with an ax to grind about Japanese destruction of forest lands in Asia. He was investigating a Thai-Japanese corporation that intimidates peasants off their lands in Isaan so they can plant eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus soak up the whole of the water table and destroy all other forms of vegetation, making the land useless for generations, but they grow fast and keep the Nips supplied with disposable chopsticks. Why the fuck they can’t use plastic chopsticks, I just don’t know. If the Chinese used disposable wood, there wouldn’t be a tree left on the planet.”
“So what’s in it for Zinna?”
“The dear General owns a thirty-five percent stake in the Thai-Nippon Reforestation and Beautification of Isaan Corporation. His men do the intimidating.”
“He’s never done this on your patch before.”
“The little prick’s showing off, making a point, breaking all the rules. He got off that court-martial, and now he’s rubbing my nose in it.” The Colonel can hardly speak for indignation.
“You’re going to let him get away with it?”
“I’m hardly going to knock heads with Zinna for one little T808, am I? Because that’s exactly what he wants me to do.” A pause dominated by his dragon breathing. “There’s always more than one way of skinning a snake.”
“What shall I tell the general manager?”
“That there won’t be publicity. That’s all he needs to know.”
I close the phone and lock with the manager’s anxious eyes. “It’s taken care of,” I say. He checks my expression to see if I mean what he wants me to mean, then grunts with relief. “What about the corpse?”
“Army specialists will take it away later today.”
“Army specialists? Why would they deal with this?”
“Because we won’t, and they can’t just leave it here. Someone will call them. Don’t worry about it-it’s one of those funny little Thai things.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“I don’t take money. Save it for the army.”
“Look,” Lek says as we are about to leave. I’d left the corpse’s shirt undone. Lek is pulling it open again. “Isn’t that the most beautiful butterfly you’ve ever seen? I mean, it’s just gorgeous.”
I pause to study the tattoo, which in my haste I had disregarded. It’s true, the workmanship is magnificent, the colors both subtle and vivid. Come to think of it, it’s a minor masterpiece.
“I’ve never seen one as good as that before,” Lek says.
In the cab on the way to the station, stuck in a brooding jam at the intersection between Petburri Road and Soi 39 (on the other side of the glass: carbon monoxide laced with air), Lek says: “Did you know that according to Buddhism there were three human beings at the beginning of the world?”
“Yes.”
“A man, a woman, and a katoey?”
“That’s right.”
“And we’ve all been all three, over and over again, going back tens of thousands of years?”
“Correct.”
“But the katoey is always the loner.”
“Katoey is a tough part of the cycle,” I say as gently as I can.
“What’s a Trance 808?”
“The murder, love. It comes from the number of the standard homicide documentation: T808. Vikorn called it Trance 808 once, and it caught on.”
Back at the station Manny (she’s five feet tall-just-and so dark she’s almost black, with the intensity of a scorpion) commands me in her most severe tone to go see Vikorn. “Don’t take him with you,” she adds, not rising from her desk, jerking her chin at Lek. In a meaningful glance at me, she adds: “The old man’s been looking at the Ravi pictures.”
I turn pale but say nothing.
Upstairs, I’m standing all alone on the bare wooden boards outside his office. In response to my knock, a bark: “What?”
“It’s me.”
“Get the fuck in here.”
I enter gingerly, in case he’s waving his pistol around, a common adjunct to Vikornic rage. Well, actually he has taken it out, it’s lying on his desk, but the signals are even worse. In a single timeless locking of eyes, I see that he’s been playing those old memory tapes again; wallowing. There’s a near-empty bottle of Mekong rice whiskey next to the gun, and an album of photographs in a large plastic cube showing his son Ravi at key moments in his short life. Ravi ’s corpse dominates the montage.
For everyone in District 8, the story is fundamental to our mythology. None of us were there at the time, but each of us has lived every moment. A few snaps from the photo album will be enough for your astute understanding, farang:
Snapshot 1: Ravi at age zero. Vikorn, husband to four wives, father to eight girls, holds his only son as if he were holding the meaning of life.
Snapshot 2: Ravi aged five, playing kiddie golf in a lush garden with the lovestruck Colonel.
Snapshot 3: Ravi at age sixteen bearing the symptoms of a seriously spoiled brat (smirk; gold Rolex; Yamaha V MAX motorbike; a beautiful girlfriend he was in the process of destroying with cocaine, sex, and alcohol; the old man making up the threesome with an obscene beam).
Snapshot 4: Ravi in his early twenties in Gucci casual standing in front of his scarlet Ferrari in Vikorn’s country estate up in Chiang Mai.
Snapshot 5: Ravi dead from a wound in his chest, his shirt soaked in pink blood fresh from the lungs.
The riots of May 1992 took everyone by surprise. It was supposed to be just another army coup (we’ve had thirteen since our first constitution in 1932, nine of them successful), but something had changed in the common people. General Suchinda, our prime minister of the month, was totally wrong-footed: the downtrodden were actually marching for democracy. A few bullets should do the trick. The order was given from on high. Zinna, no more than a colonel at the time, was one of those officers who believe in leading by example. (Perhaps he doubted his men would fire on their own people?) He raised his own gun, a large pistol, and fired just as he gave the order for his men to do likewise. Fifty died in the un-Buddhist bloodbath. Outrage and democracy swiftly followed (it was that or civil war), but Ravi, it seems, had never intended to join the march; he had simply been forced to abandon his Ferrari because the demonstrators were blocking the street and he got caught up in their rage. (The autopsy revealed white powder all but blocking Ravi ’s nasal passages; he had died with a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in his left hand, and the alcohol level in his blood was high.)