I fished out my cell phone to call him. I told him of a patient/victim who might need extensive brain surgery and suggested he might like to help out with the expenses. That he even hesitated told me that he somehow knew more about the bomb at Klong Toey than anyone else I’d talked to that day. He said, “Okay, I’ll have Manny deal with it.”
“What about the other two-they’re not thought to be in serious danger, but I guess you’d want to keep them all together?”
A normal reaction would have been for him to say, No, what the hell for?
“Sure,” he said, “have all three moved to the international hospital at Hua Lamphong. They do a lot of brain stuff there.”
“Yes,” I told the nurse, “there are funds-but are you equipped for such an operation? Should we think of moving him somewhere else?”
The nurse smiled with relief. “Oh, yes, that is good news. One of the big international hospitals will have all the machines and the expertise. We don’t have any specialist brain surgeons here.”
I decided to try to clear up one part of the puzzle. “How did you know their names?” I asked.
“They arrived with a money belt containing three passports. We’re waiting for the Cambodian embassy to provide more identification, so we can tell who is who.”
“Cambodian? But they’re all Americans.”
“Yes, that’s what the passports say: Americans with Cambodian citizenship. I’ll show you the photocopies the registration staff took of the passports.”
I followed him out of the ward and down to the registration area. He entered an office and quickly returned with three bundles of photocopies.
Khmer script looks quite a lot like Thai, unless you’re Thai, when it appears as a collection of tantalizing squiggles and curls-pretty much the way Thai would appear to you, R. Fortunately, the Khmer was translated into English for purposes of international travel. The owners were Americans who had been naturalized as Cambodian citizens. The photographs were taken a long time ago, however, and were useless for identification. The only stamps were Thai visas. It seemed the owners had entered Thailand about ten months before and obtained retirement visas good for a year. They had entered our country together at the same time on the same day.
I thanked the nurse and promised that a team from the hospital in Chinatown would send an ambulance once the paperwork had been sorted out.
–
From the hospital I decided to use a motorbike taxi to avoid the jam on Rama IV. Like the bike jockeys on Soi Cowboy, my man was a hardbody with a neck like a buffalo who loved taking chances. You become very conscious of your knees when your pilot starts into the close-vehicle work, winding between stationary or slowly moving vans, cars, and trucks. He knew what he was doing and expected me to take care of my own legs. Then my phone rang. I saw the call was from Krom.
“Where are you?”
“On the back of a bike dying from asphyxiation.”
“You went to the hospital? Did you find out anything?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t do this. Tell me what you discovered.”
“The three American victims own Cambodian passports.”
It seemed I had finally impressed her. “Interesting life choice,” she said.
On reflection, that was my reaction too. I don’t want to cause offense, R, but let’s face it, there has been a steady exodus from spiritual desolation in the Occident for some time now. Farang these days find wives or husbands in many Asian nations, including Thailand, Malaysia-and of course China. Cambodia, though? If they weren’t so old, one would assume they were CIA spies as a matter of course.
“I’ll tell you more tomorrow when you come by,” I said and closed the phone.
9
We started our morning with a row, Chanya and I. She wanted to know exactly why Krom was coming to visit, and if it was a business call, then why did she, Chanya, need to be there at all? She meant she didn’t need a social or professional event in which she was merely ornamental. She had a PhD, for Buddha’s sake, a Facebook following of nearly a thousand, she had written learned articles for online academic journals-and none of it seemed to impinge on reality at all, as if it all happened on a Google cloud somewhere. She was honest enough to admit that hers was a strange, possibly certifiable form of paranoia-but quite common these days. What she most resented was finding herself in the role of insecure little wife who had to be included in a serious adult meeting so that she wouldn’t feel like-well, an insecure little wife.
She was still in one of her rages while she showered out in the yard under a hosepipe, skillfully deploying a towel so no prying eyes could see her private parts, then returned dripping to the hovel, feeling better. She gave me a sheepish smile, laid a hand on my forearm. “Sorry.” She smiled.
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“No you don’t. You have a job. That makes you real. I don’t, that makes me a ghost. Let’s leave it at that.”
I guessed that was as good as it was going to get, so I shrugged, smiled, hugged her, and we were about as patched up as we were going to be that merry morning. I guessed she would not let the meeting pass without asserting herself in some way in accordance with online advice from her groups.
We were both showered, soaped, perfumed, and ready for Krom in about ten minutes. I felt tense and excited at the same time. As a cop I knew better than to hope for a sudden big break in the Market Murder case; as a man I hoped for a sudden big break in the case that had my name on it in blood.
Chanya could not resist an irrelevant question. “I wonder what Inspector Krom will be wearing? I mean, she can’t come in uniform since it’s all so hush-hush. What does a dyke like her put on for breakfast meetings?”
Now that I thought of it, that was a fascinating piece of trivia. What would Krom be wearing?
“It depends if she comes by taxi or on the back of a bike,” Chanya said.
“Why?”
“If she dresses up, she won’t want to be windblown. Depends how much she needs to impress you.” She coughed. “I mean, for her enterprises, of course, whatever they are.” Then she added, “She may be a dyke, but she’s still a woman, you know.”
It was a taxi. The young woman who emerged with a close-cropped haircut and dark glasses wore a fresh-pressed black shirt with cream bootlace tie, a cutaway jacket in black-and-white butcher’s stripes, pants with knife-sharp creases and the same wide vertical stripes as the jacket, brogues only slightly feminized with square toes, also two-tone. When I opened the door I was much refreshed by a strong cologne: Fabergé Brut for Men, if I was not mistaken. She carried a slim black briefcase.
“Do come in,” I said with a smile. Once in, she made a point of waiing Chanya. Chanya waied back. She had to acknowledge how impeccably Krom was behaving, giving the woman of the house big face, as the Chinese say.
There were no chairs or sofas to sit on, but I guessed Krom was brought up without furniture, like Chanya and me; she had no trouble hitching up her pants, bending her knees, and sitting on a cushion with her back against a wall like a well-dressed gangster. She took a single sheet of paper out of the briefcase. It looked like a printout from the Net.
“MKUltra,” she said.
Krom passed the single sheet over to us.
“I just copied the headline. I think that seeing it in black and white on a public document kind of helps with the credibility.”
It was a short extract from an article in Wikipedia. We looked at it, then looked up, blinking. Krom read from the extract and we followed, word by word: