As he slides the dead eel into my trouser pocket, in hardly more than a murmur: “Tell Colonel Vikorn he’s gone too far. He framed me, I got off, now the dope belongs to me. He doesn’t get a second shot. I’ll have his guts, one way or another.” Casting a contemptuous glance at Lek: “And I’ll have your bum boy, too.”
He and his men turn and leave. We are alone in marine darkness with a corpse full of hungry eels. As if sensing the coast is clear, the girl at the bow of the ship shrieks and laughs again with impressive professionalism calculated to make her sailor feel powerful, predatory, irresistible, charming, and horny. It seems a secret party is under way, for a couple more girls cry out, laugh, make vulgar jokes in Thai while their men shout in Chinese. Three female faces appear over the bows, then immediately disappear.
Sudden quiet, in which the soft padding of a large rat can be heard. Far off someone is crossing the river in a long-tail boat. I decide to save the man I once interrogated from further forensic indignity, but it is not easy. He’s heavy and elusive in the way of corpses. Grasping his wrists and signaling for Lek to help me, I drag him to the side of the dock, twist him around, then try to push him in. Lek leans over from the hips, elegantly failing to grasp the cadaver’s feet. I’m sweating in the night heat and experiencing an irrational reluctance to make contact with the eels, which are still feasting. With a foot on one shoulder, near the neck, I give a mighty shove. His arms still outstretched, the tattoos Mother and Denise are the last of him to slide over the edge and into the river with the most discreet of splashes.
I reach into my pocket and throw Zinna’s dead eel after him. Where’s Lek? Frantic for a second (I experience a vision of rape and degradation at the hands of Zinna’s men), I catch sight of him a little farther down the dock, in a pool of light.
The most classic of all our classical dance derives from the Hindu Ramayana, in which the god Vishnu incarnates as Rama and gets into a fight with evil over the life of his bride Sita. Lek is playing Sita on her knees pleading for her lord and master to believe in her eternal fidelity.
I put my arm around him as I lead him away. “He called me a bum boy.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not a bum boy, I’m a dancer.”
“I know you are.”
He turns his big hazel eyes onto me, merciless in his trust, love, and expectation.
When we pass the spot, we hear the ferocious churning of fish and eels that the T808 is feeding. For a tantalizing moment I see his life disperse into its many components, which spin away from one another into the night. The composite problem that was Chaz Buckle is now resolved.
24
It seems, though, that other composites are resolving into dust and spirit this violent night. Just after I’ve dropped Lek off at his project, Lieutenant Manhatsirikit calls me on my mobile.
“The Colonel’s at Khun Mu’s house. Better get over there.”
There’s nothing much to say, farang, that you have not already guessed. At Khun Mu’s house all the dogs and monkeys are dead (gutted), the guards executed, mostly by bullets to the skull. Khun Mu, naked, is wrapped around Joey’s embalmed corpse in an obscene position, her throat cut. And there is a fat dead farang woman in her mid-forties slit from gut to chest, lying on the king-size bed in the great bedroom, wearing only a huge pair of shorts.
“Denise?” I ask Vikorn.
He nods. “She lived in a million-dollar mansion overlooking the Andaman Sea in Phuket. He kidnapped her and brought her here just to show that he could.” A shaking of the head. “Just to make a point.” Looking at me: “All our witnesses are dead.”
Vikorn walks over to the sofa by the window and sits heavily. I’ve never seen him so despondent. “We’ve been going against him symmetrically,” he mutters, “that’s the problem. We can’t beat him on violence. He’s the army, for Buddha’s sake.” A quick glance at me. “I’m sorry, Sonchai. I’m taking the file away from you.”
“You have someone better?”
“It needs nuance, a woman’s touch.”
“Manny? She’s not exactly subtle.”
He shrugs: no comment. He is huddled on his seat, shrunken, the very image of defeat; there are even tears in his eyes. I feel a great wave of pity-but wait! Somehow his projection of despair, frustration, misery, near-senility is a little too pat.
“Someone’s come up with a Plan C, haven’t they?”
He looks at me blankly as if he has no idea what I’m talking about.
At the station the next day, it is revealed that Vikorn spent the morning watching international news on his TV, which is normally dedicated to Thai pool. (He runs the main gambling syndicate.) When I go in to see him, I find him fixated by the monitor. It seems there has been a terrorist bomb in some remote village in Java, Indonesia, five Indonesian Hindus dead, about twenty more hospitalized. No one doubts the culprits are from an extreme Muslim faction, particularly because one of them died in the blast. Bits of his skullcap and beard, some fingers, a leg, and other body parts have been recovered. It is anticipated that his identity and that of the particular splinter group to which he belonged will soon be known. Naturally, the Western intelligence agencies are interested and only too willing to lend assistance.
I have no idea why Vikorn, who is hardly a fully globalized world citizen (I’m not sure he could identify France on a map), should be so interested, but when I cough with a view to attracting his attention, he raises a hand. When the news program has exhausted its real-time coverage, he lifts his telephone and-to my amazement-tells Lieutenant Manhatsirikit to get him on the next flight to Jakarta. While he is on the way to the airport, she is to make arrangements for him to meet someone senior in the Indonesian police, with a view to “mutually beneficial information sharing.” I am staring open-mouthed while he rummages around. In all my time in District 8, my Colonel has never once left Thailand ’s sacred soil. Now Manny arrives and scowls at me before telling him that an interpreter has been located and this person, who is fluent in whatever language they speak down there (Vikorn keeps calling it Indonesian, but both Lieutenant Manhatsirikit and I have our doubts), will meet him at the airport tomorrow. When she has left, he checks his watch. Seven p.m. “We’re going to eat,” he tells me, and presses an autodial number on his mobile to call his driver.
In the back of his Bentley, with “The Ride of the Valkyries” screaming from the sound system, his driver with his usual supercilious expression plastered all over his mug, my Colonel places a hand on my shoulder. “You’re going to forget last night. It never happened. You’re going to concentrate on the Mitch Turner case.”