“But how did the wholesaler know to trust them? And I bet they have safe passage with the dope anywhere in Klong Toey. And I bet that cost them at least ten percent. And I bet you charged a setup fee as well.”
“Win-win,” the Sergeant said, lighting a Krong Thip 90 and sipping some more whiskey. “One of them told me there are farang books about it. Economics, they call it.”
“So what happened this month? Why weren’t they at the market on the last Thursday?”
“ ’Cause they didn’t need to be. These are not ambitious empire builders. They did so well in their sales the previous month, they had enough money to last them. There was a group of oldies passing through, relatives of vets missing in action, just come back from Vietnam. Bought up all their stock. They always worked on a sufficiency basis. They were careful never to take too much.”
I sipped the Mekong and nodded. It was important not to rush him. “You mean, whoever planted the bomb was relying on them being out, at the market, when it went off?”
“Why else choose that morning on that day of the month? There are no coincidences in Thailand.”
I scratched my chin. “So the bomb was just to scare them?”
“Yes, that’s my theory.”
“But why?”
He shrugged. “In Bangkok it could be anything. Maybe the bombers thought the Americans had cheated them. Maybe they were just Thais who don’t like farang moving into the business. Or it could be something else. Like I say, those old men have only been here less than a year. They would have a lot of history from another country, wouldn’t they? And what kind of history, when you consider they chose to live in the lowest kind of third-world slum?”
I let a couple of beats pass. Atmosphere is important for intuition, and that’s the faculty I wanted the Sergeant to exercise right now. “You’re right, dead right. Why did they need Klong Toey? Those old men, the three of them-there must have been something different about them that you noticed. There aren’t any other farang living here, not even birdshit farang like them. And, frankly, I’ve never heard of Americans becoming Cambodian citizens. The traffic tends to be in the other direction.”
He took a deep toke on his Krong Thip, sipped some more Mekong, and nodded. “That’s right.”
“So, what about them?”
“At first they seemed just like old farang men, you know, kind of charming, steady, very likable, been in the East a long time, smart enough to be polite like Thais instead of aggressive like farang.”
“Then?”
“Then, when you watched them carefully, you realized they were all crazy. In a very specific way that’s hard to explain and not actually out of control in the way of most crazies. But they were all nuts.”
“Could you be a little more specific? You call someone crazy, you have to have a reason.”
“Ask anyone who knew them around here.”
I lost patience. “But what were the symptoms?”
“You don’t have to snap. I know what you want to know, but there’s no way to tell you what you want to know, because it’s so hard to explain. If one of them recovers, spend an hour with him and you’ll see what I mean.”
I grunted, leaned back in the chair, tried to tune in to his long, slow waves. “In what way crazy? Give me an example.”
“In the middle of a conversation they would break off.”
“Old men’s minds wander.”
“This wasn’t wandering. They would break off and think very intensely about something for as long as five minutes, as though they were in a different world, then return to the conversation. They all did it. They were aware of it and tried to cover up. That’s what was crazy.”
At the moment I had no way of absorbing Lotus Bud’s psychoanalysis of the three old men. I was as drunk as I needed to be to bond with the Sergeant, who was quite drunk himself. I figured it was now or never with my killer question.
“Sergeant,” I said softly, in a tone I’d not used before. Even in his inebriation he noticed the nuance, laid his head back, closed his eyes, then opened the left one to glance at me. “The smart phone you found after the explosion.” He grunted, closed both eyes. “Sergeant, it was in exceptionally good condition for a phone that had been thrown up in the air by a bomb and landed on concrete. It was not only brand-new, it was an Apple 5s-a luxury, almost like jewelry, costs over twenty-five thousand baht new, when anyone can buy a cell phone for just a few thousand. I bet there’s no one in Klong Toey who owns an iPhone-not a legal one, anyway. Everyone around here buys fakes or secondhand or stolen. And that place where you said you found it, that was quite a way from the bomb site. A delicate thing like a phone, especially a sophisticated one like that…Well, it was operating perfectly, wasn’t it? Those photos of me were clear and bright, just as if the phone had not been through an explosion. And it was brand-new.”
A long pause during which LB took a slug of rice whiskey. “He said I had to let you figure it out for yourself. He didn’t really care if you found out, but I wasn’t to tell you unless you figured it out first. He’s playing some game with you.”
“You mean someone came to see you? Before or after the explosion?”
“After. A few hours after.”
“And gave you that iPhone and told you to call Vikorn?”
“Yes.”
“Who was he?”
“An American.”
“Huge, old, a giant?”
“No. He wasn’t old. He was tall. Slim. Young. Very fit like an athlete or a military man. His hair was very short and so blond it was almost white. A killer.”
“How would you know that?”
“How would I not know that? I’ve been a cop in Klong Toey for three decades. How could I survive if I didn’t know men? And women too. Pimps, whores, pickpockets, burglars, car thieves, murderers for passion, murderers for greed: each one has a different signal, a different smell.”
“How was his signal?”
“Flat. Only killers for fun have that signal. What do you call them?”
“Psychopaths.”
“Right.”
A pause while I absorbed this wisdom. “That’s all-he came, gave you the phone, and told you to call me but not to mention him?”
“Yes. He said you would be very interested. It was very private, very personal. Between you and him. He said you and he would be meeting soon. He said you and he are going to be very close.” Lotus Bud turned his head. “I thought about that. You’re working on that murder of a young woman who lived in the market square behind the police station in District 8, right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you thought about where that is exactly? I checked on a map after he left.”
“Of course I know where it is.”
“I mean geographically.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s the exact geographic center of District 8. If D8 is a chessboard, that murder happened on the center squares. Your district, with your name on the mirror. What could be clearer than that?”
We stared at each other. Now my cell phone started to ring. I fished it out impatiently, afraid that the Sergeant would change his mind about confiding his thoughts to me. It was the young Detective Tassatorn again.
“Khun Sonchai? I have news. Do you want the good or the bad first?”
He was a little breathless, and at first I supposed it must be because he’d cracked the case and, like a good Buddhist, was trying not to sound too proud of himself.
“The good first.”
“I’ve found them.”