No mention is made of Ravi in the final report of the commission of inquiry into the riots, but every Thai understood what had gone on in Zinna’s mind when he selected his one and only target. Ravi, you see, looked like a rich man’s child, even from a distance. Perhaps Zinna didn’t know who he was, but he understood very well what he was, and by all the rules of feudalism he should have held his fire. But Zinna, an upwardly mobile soldier-gangster of humble origins with chips on both shoulders, saw no reason for special treatment and fired deliberately at the arrogant, spoiled, drunk, drugged product of the system he served. Or did Zinna indeed recognize the son of his greatest rival? This is Vikorn’s firm belief, for Zinna had purchased his commission with the fruits of his own substantial trafficking. Only Zinna knows what was in his mind when he pulled the trigger, but certain it is that with one fatal shot, he started a feud to last a lifetime. An unexpected consequence has been Vikorn’s passionate conversion to democracy. He saw that the people were the only stick big enough with which to beat the army.
There have been many skirmishes in this war, for Zinna is no mean adversary. Deciding eventually, like all great narrators, that truth is best expressed through fiction, Vikorn one day last year had a truck dump a pile of morphine bricks onto Zinna’s land in his country hideout up in Chiang Mai, then tipped off the local police chief. The scandal almost sank the General, but with his usual resilience he mounted a spirited defense at his court-martial, during which he supplied video shots taken from a security camera. The film showed a truck inexplicably arriving across a field, then two young men wearing black lace-up boots unhooking the back and pulling the gray brick-sized contents onto the land. Close-ups indicated the boots were not army but police issue.
The minute he saw that Zinna would survive his trial, Vikorn began another tack. Rather than micromanage Zinna’s downfall himself, he has instead guaranteed promotion and a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any cop in District 8 who finally nails the General. In addition, he has placed a trusted subordinate in charge of the file (if you can call it that, for nothing is ever written down in this inquiry), with the standing instruction to work on it whenever there’s nothing more pressing in the in-box. Vikorn’s choice of subordinate in this case was shrewd in the extreme: how did he guess that buried among my most secret defilements was a passion for promotion?
“He dropped the mark on my patch.” Vikorn glares at me.
“Not the best party manners.”
“Don’t give me your fucking supercilious farang back-chat.”
“Sorry.”
“D’you realize what this means?”
“Maybe I’m missing the finer points.”
“Maybe you’re missing the main fucking point. Would you come to my house and drop an elephant turd on my Persian rug?”
“Your what?”
“That’s the level of insult. It doesn’t get worse than this. No one, I mean no one, not even your army fuckups, does this. It’s the main rule. Without it we’d have-we’d have-”
“Anarchy?”
He looks at me but does not see me. In this case blind rage is no metaphor. He stops abruptly, goes to his desk, and picks up the gun to examine it curiously, as if unsure of the crimes it is about to commit, then with great care lays it down again next to the photos. I breathe a sigh of relief, for I have seen this before: the white heat of his fury slowly but surely mastered by a Herculean determination to use his great intellect for the purpose of spite. He looks at me again, eyes still glazed somewhat, but brighter. “Yes, anarchy. Do farang really suppose that our society could survive one minute without rules? Just because we don’t follow the written ones doesn’t make us third-world bums. No jao por wastes a mark on another jao por’s patch. It just doesn’t happen. This could take us back to the stone age.”
“I understand.”
“Good. You understand. Well, that’s all that fucking matters, isn’t it? In the whole fucking universe, what really makes the stars shine and the planets orbit is whether Sonchai Jitpleecheep understands or not.”
“I didn’t-”
“Didn’t what? You’re in charge of the X file-you were supposed to protect me from this.”
“Huh? You never said anything about protecting you from Zinna’s provocation. You said keep an eye out for opportunity-”
A scream: “Don’t you see I’ve got to respond? And it has to be even worse than what he did to me?”
I refrain from saying: That’s not a very Buddhist point of view.
Heaving, but resuming self-control. “Give me a report. How many major drug busts since Zinna got off?”
“Only two. They were both attempted exports to Europe.”
“And?”
“The first was a minor player, a mule. She’s pleading guilty. There’s no obvious connection to Zinna-it was heroin, not morphine.”
“And the other?”
He looks at me, causing a great quaking in my guts. “Sorry, I forgot to follow up.”
“You what?”
“I was distracted. They brought him in a few days ago, looks like a heavy hitter, but we got focused on the farang Chanya wasted, and then I made that trip down south.”
Glaring: “We still have the junk?”
“It’s with the forensic boys.”
“Morphine or heroin?”
“Looks like morphine.”
Screaming: “Do what you need to do. I want to know where that morphine came from. I know he took my dope back from the army after the court-martial.”
Exiting with a high wai: “Yes, sir.”
I’m out in the corridor making running repairs to my psyche after the Vikornic onslaught. Look at it this way: for the Colonel to guess what Zinna will do next, he merely has to consult his own psychology. If Zinna dumped a hundred kilos of morphine on Vikorn’s land, what would Vikorn have done? Do I hear: Sold the dope, of course? In the event (not, when all was told, unlikely) that Zinna found a way of wriggling out of the frame-up, would the General miss an opportunity of making twenty million dollars or so out of the product that his arch-enemy so generously supplied free, gratis, and for nothing? Do wounded bulls charge red rags?
Back at my desk, my first call is to Sergeant Ruamsantiah.
“That farang with the morphine last week. What was his name?”