“Pretty much.”
“You don’t mind about going there at night, just the two of us?”
“We’re cops, Lek.”
“I know. I wasn’t asking for myself. I feel so safe with you. You’re like a kind of Buddha for me-just being with you banishes fear.”
“You have to stop talking like that.”
“Because it’s not macho cop? But I love you for what you’re doing for me-I can’t deny my heart.” I sigh. “Would you mind telling me when we’re going to meet my Elder Sister?”
“When we’re ready. You and me.”
The truth is, I’ve still not found the stomach to introduce Lek to Fatima. Every time I pick up the phone to call her, I have a vision of her eating the kid alive. “Look, Lek, remember what you were telling me the other day, about the path of a katoey being the toughest, loneliest path a human being can choose?”
“I didn’t choose it. The spirit who saved my life chose it.”
“Right. And maybe that spirit has chosen Fatima -but I need to be sure. I feel like I’m holding your life in my hands here.”
Lek stretches out a hand to rest on my knee for a moment. “The Buddha will give you enlightenment for this. You’re so advanced, you’re almost there.”
“I don’t feel advanced. I feel like I’m corrupting youth.”
Lek smiles. “That only shows how holy you are. But I have to follow my path, don’t I? This is my destiny we’re talking about. My karma. My fate.”
“Right.”
“Will you lend me the money for the collagen implants in my buttocks and chest?”
I groan. “I guess so.”
Klong Toey: grave crime at its most poetic. The talat (market) is the emotional center, a square acre of green umbrellas and tarps beneath which chilies lie short and wicked on poor women’s shawls; chickens cram together dead or alive; ducks grumble in wooden cages; every kind of crab mimes death agonies in plastic bowls or gasps in the heat (both fresh- and saltwater, soft shell or hard); open-air butchers chop up whole buffalo; jackfruit, pineapple, orange, durian, grapefruit, bolts of cheap cotton, every kind of hand tool for the third-world handyman (generally of such inferior steel, they give out during the first hour-I have a personal vendetta against our screwdrivers, which bend like pewter-they would drive you totally nuts, farang); and so on. There are even some corrugated iron shacks nearby from the skulduggery school of architecture, joined clandestinely by precarious walkways that cry out for a chase scene, but most of the buildings surrounding the square are three-story shop-houses of the Chinese tradition. The sidewalks provide good clues as to the business of the shops: whole automobile engines pile up outside their ateliers dripping black oil; air-conditioning ducts of all dimensions stand proud outside another; CD rip-offs on stalls, the latest boom boxes block the way outside the stereo store. There are no farang here (either they don’t know, or knowing, they stay away), these slow-moving crowds of brown folk are as local as somtam salad, common as rice. The point: Klong Toey district includes the main port on the Chao Phraya river, where ships have unloaded since the beginning of time. (There are sepia pix of our forefathers in traditional three-quarter black pants, naked to the waist, their long black hair tied back from their fine foreheads in magnificent ponytails, unloading by hand in the impossible heat, many emaciated from your opium, farang.) A couple of streets away: a fine big customs shed and a complex of buildings belonging to the Port Authority of Thailand. The river itself is no more than a stone’s throw away, and many of the original inhabitants of this seething township have built their shacks on stilts on the other side of the water. Medieval riverboat men ferry the poor to and fro for twenty baht a trip in their modest hand-built canoes (with Yamaha outboards and millionaire bow-waves). In short, everyone knows the main industry is pharmaceuticals, for there is probably nowhere in Thailand where dealers, kingpins, addicts, cops, and customs are so conveniently massed together in one square mile of business-friendly riverfront real estate. Inevitably spin-off industries such as contract slaying, loan-sharking, and extortion have moved their headquarters here. I’m a little surprised that Colonel Bumgrad is troubling himself with a mere Trance 808. I was afraid of hostility on his part, for he is one of Vikorn’s many enemies, but he’s the incarnation of charm as he greets me when Lek and I get out of the cab.
They’ve laid Chaz Buckle out on the dockside under a blanket. The police launch is tied up to a capstan between two gigantic container vessels. The view is blocked in every direction by looming bows, rusting sterns, and iron gangplanks. Impenetrable marine shadows cast darkness over the poorly lit footpaths. Bumgrad nods to me, and I lift the blanket: a single shot in the back of the head, with exit wound that blew out his left eye. He is soggy from time spent in the river, but the assassination is recent. Even if I did not recognize the ruined face, the tattoos would have been identification enough.
“We haven’t checked his pockets yet,” Bumgrad murmurs. “We thought maybe you would want to do that.”
I lean over the body, then jump back as a small blind eel wriggles from out his mouth. His pockets are undulating. Lek, watching closely, puts a hand over his mouth. When I rip open his shirt, I see that his stomach, too, is in perpetual motion. There is a faint pop, and a blind white head with mouth full of tiny teeth emerges from his belly button. I snap my head around-is this some kind of joke?-but Bumgrad and his men are gone, disappeared into the black maze of the dock. Lek steps back, stifling a squeal. Eels are burrowing out of the corpse, desperate to find a way back to the river. I also take ten paces back.
A whoreshriek from the bows of the container boat-sailors are a specialized market that my mother and I don’t touch-then silence, save for the ring of iron-shod heels. A short stocky uniformed figure with ramrod back and voluminous chest emerges from the dark beyond and marches toward us until he is standing in a pool of light shed by a small lamp hanging from a ship’s cable. I slowly get to my feet, close my hands in a wai, and raise them to my lips.
“Good evening, General Zinna,” I say, carefully maintaining the wai.
Without replying, the General walks slowly toward me and stares down at the corpse. “Someone exercised compassion,” he says in a whispered baritone. “They killed him before they shoved the eels up his ass. That way he didn’t feel them eating his guts out. I doubt I would show such restraint toward someone who really irritated me. Know what I mean?” He raises a hand, and snaps his fingers once. There is a sound of running boots; now more than a dozen young men in black sweatshirts and army haircuts are emerging from the shadows at a jog. They stand behind him in military formation until he nods to two of them, who go over to Chaz to shine a flashlight on his belly, which is now quite eaten away with a tangle of white writhing worms. The General walks over, picks one of the eels out of Chaz’s guts, deftly kills it by whipping its head against the capstan, and returns to me.