“Yes. I thought you ought to know right away.”
That is an incomplete sentence. The unstated part would be something like, Before I tell everyone else.
“Thank you, Detective. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it very much.” He is so much younger than me, it is not difficult to sound as if I have it all under control.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“Leave it with me,” I hear myself say in a confident tone. “I’ll get back to you.”
When I close the phone I’m shuddering. I have to stand up and take a walk before the cop at the next post sees what kind of state I am in. Outside on the street, I stride toward Sukhumvit at quite a clip until I’m out of range of the station’s psychic orbit. One anxiety a cop in Krung Thep doesn’t normally have is fear of perps. Our rules are quite strict: no matter how unpopular you might be with your colleagues, no gangster is ever going to target you, because the boys would close ranks and take him out. It’s not quite as rigid a law as gravity, but close. Now I don’t feel so protected. How much evidence does a person need before they’re entitled to own their paranoia? The bloody mirror with my name on it could have been an aberration by a psycho. An iPhone with a hundred photos of me on it is not so easily explained, but not necessarily sinister in itself (Chanya tried to cheer me up by suggesting it’s because I’m so good-looking: probably some katoey with a crush on me took the pix). It’s always the third clue that clinches it, both in madness and in law enforcement: another phone at the scene of the bombing with pictures of me in the photo gallery? And taken on Soi Cowboy, just like all the photos on the iPhone?
Naturally, I need a smoke, and, to be honest here, R, I am on the point of going home and leaving the planet on Air Cannabis for a while, when that curious blip called duty drives me in another direction. Obviously, I need to pay a second visit to Sergeant Lotus Bud at KTC. There is a detour I need to make first, though.
11
The best place to buy carved wooden religious objects was on Petchburi Road. In a shop surrounded by Buddhas, bodhisattvas, monks, angels, fairies, gnomes, and demons, I scratched my head. Personally, I was partial to the old Burmese carved monks, for the workmanship (you buy them in pairs: skinny with walking sticks, bent, devout, cheerful, at peace). In the old days the carver meditated until he saw the subject in the crude wood before he started chiseling. I found a couple of teak monks that would fit beside me on the seat of a cab and haggled over the price until I lost patience and paid up. I carried the monks to the cab, where I carefully set them down in the backseat, according them all dignity.
When I arrived at the police post in Klong Toey, I saw that a supper of rice whiskey and noodles had liberated the sweetness within the middle-aged cop. What a lifetime of self-denial and contemplation had done for the monks, a quarter bottle of Mekong had done for him. With alcohol, though, it’s all about timing. If I’d arrived earlier, he might have retained some resistance; later and he would probably be incoherent or belligerent. I’d bought a flask of my own to top him up if necessary.
I carried the monks out of the cab and set them down on his desk as he watched. At this moment it did not matter, according to the theology, how I treated the sculptures, because they had not yet been consecrated, but I showed respect anyway. The Sergeant stood back to assess them.
“Burmese? Nineteenth century? Will you look at those heads…The model the sculptor used-must have been a child or a young woman-perfect. What a wonderful image of innocence! Reminds me of the kids here, before they go wrong.”
He saw no contradiction between innocence and the hundred scams he was up to his ears in; his contemplation had long ago taken him beyond such false distinctions. Nor did it matter that I was bribing him with religious objects: it made him feel all the more devout.
He had placed his great chair with cushions outside his cabin and invited me to grab one of the tubular chairs inside. He placed the flask of Mekong I’d brought on a small collapsible table between the chairs. We drank out of plastic cups and talked about Klong Toey, the slum and the famous market of the same name.
He particularly wanted to talk about the market, how it was the closest to the port and received goods brought from overseas via the Gulf of Thailand, but also, because the port was on the river, goods are brought there from the interior. True, he explained, “It’s not a wholesale market, but most restaurants, especially the thousands of cooked-food stalls, buy a lot of food in detail rather than bulk.” I knew that to be true. Come between three and six in the morning and you’ll see a representative of just about every major restaurant in the city, even the very top end, which send the chefs themselves to find the choice sea bass, snow fish, fresh chicken, rabbit, beef, every variety of chili, lemongrass (gross or in detail), and every other herb, vegetable, meat, fish, or poultry that hit the tables of restaurants and private homes throughout the city every day. Italian chefs in particular valued our basil, which we cultivate in a number of varieties: sweet, holy, and hairy.
But I didn’t understand why we were talking about basil when he knew very well why I’d come. I was wondering if he was not just too drunk, too old, or too decadent to be of use, when he said, “It was an accident, you know.”
“What? The bombing? How can a bombing be an accident?”
“Not the bombing, the casualties. It was the first Thursday in the month.”
“So?”
“First Thursday in the month, those Yanks were normally up before dawn-usually about three-thirty a.m.-to visit the market.”
“They were in the catering business?” He grunted and wasn’t going to speak until I’d at least started to work it out. “There’s a delivery-a special delivery-first Thursday in the month?”
“Sure. A rice barge brings it from the north. The kingpins are Lao. Everyone in the business knows. I bet your Colonel Vikorn knows. It’s basically cottage-industry stuff, though.”
I was trying to decrypt the story, which was not difficult, and at the same time trying to fit it in with what little I knew about the three Americans. It seemed they had only been hanging out in Bangkok for ten months. I had no information about where they were before that, but ten months is not long enough to set up a fully protected trafficking operation from scratch all on your own, not if you want to be secure. You would need local input, local operators you trusted. I figure there is only one plausible explanation.
“They came to you when they first arrived? They were old Southeast Asia hands who were naturalized Cambodians, so they would know the form if not the local language.”
“They came to me for help. They said they’d had to leave Cambodia, but they didn’t say why they were in Cambodia, or why three Americans their age could not return to the States. But they were sincere, I could see that. I felt compassion for them. Obviously, they needed a trade, some way to make dough. And they learned Thai much quicker than most farang, because they were already fluent in Khmer. After a couple of months they were part of the furniture. Very unusual.”
I’d been trying to keep my sipping of the Mekong to a minimum, but I was starting to feel a tad tipsy. “You set it up for them?”
“I never set up anything. I told them a certain wholesaler who brings sacks of jasmine rice down from the north occasionally brings something else in the bags. He is very discreet, a careful man, almost as old as them. I like dealing with old men, they’re safer and they don’t have ridiculous ambitions. It turned out fine. The rice producer would hold a monthly auction among, say, ten trusted dealers, usually dividing the produce up between them. They each have their own patch, so there’s no fighting. The Americans would buy just enough to sell to American tourists they felt they could trust. They would hang out in Khaosan Road, checking out just the right farang who wants to get high in Asia, but is old enough and cool enough to keep quiet. That’s what I knew they would do and it worked out fine.”