“Yes. That’s it. Nong’s your mother’s name, isn’t it?”
“Every third girl on the street is called Nong.”
“I know. But you came back to ask about him. That’s why I mentioned it.”
18
Obviously, the Asset killed the girl in the market apartment. With his superhuman strength he twisted her head, snapped the vertebrae between C4 and C5, and pulled until it detached from her body. Then he wrote my name on the mirror in blood, including a reference to my father.
As you know, R, normally in police procedurals you are given the identity of the perpetrator one-third of the way through the narrative and have the pleasure of watching the sympathetic, humble, hardworking cop (but s/he’s a dead shot with a forty-five) plow their way through the clues in a frenzy (must stop the bastard before he kills again) until the cop finally discovers what you the reader already know-whodunit-thus clearing the decks for a nice little orgy of vengeance at the denouement. Here it’s different: I-the-cop am now certain he dunit, and he did it to reach me in a way that hurts the most. That innocent girl with the head of a Buddha died just so he could get my attention. The mystery is why? In theory all I have to do is wait. Except that he has disappeared. A week has passed and no trace. Goldman also has disappeared. All I have to play with is that smart phone. Therefore I call over and over again the number of the single entry in Contacts that begins with the Vietnamese country code. If I wake up in the early hours, unable to sleep, the first thing I do is press autodial for that number. No answer. Then, one fine night, around three-fifteen in the morning, I try it and there is an answer.
“Hello?”
The accent is very British, very cultivated, from a more authentic age when such vowels could be uttered without fear of ridicule. For a moment I’m stuck for words. I don’t want to wake Chanya, so I get up and take the phone out into the yard. The voice becomes impatient and suspicious: “Yes? Hello?”
There is really only one person it can be. “Dr. Christmas Bride?”
A pause. “Who wants to know?”
“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, Doctor, calling from Bangkok. I was given your number in connection with a case I’m investigating here.”
A longer pause while he adjusts his attitude. Then he says, “Bullshit.”
I think he is about to close the phone on me. I need a key word to hold him.
“Goldman,” I say, “Mr. Joseph Goldman,” and let the silence speak for itself. He is in no hurry to rise to the bait.
“I see,” he says slowly. “You have my attention. How did you get my number? Who told you to call me?” The tone now is incisive, peremptory, imperial.
“A colleague handed me a telephone in connection with a murder inquiry.”
Silence, then, “I don’t think that answers my question, does it?”
I decide to risk the truth; half of it anyway. “This number was in the Contacts file of a telephone that may be relevant to a bombing at Klong Toey, here in Bangkok.”
A sharp intake of breath.
“You knew about that bombing?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Never mind.” A pause. “I’m afraid this is all a surprise to me, though frankly not a huge one. I’ll have to think about it and call you back.”
I have the feeling he will call someone else as soon as I close the phone.
–
I walk around in circles, waiting for him to call me back. He takes about ten minutes, and now I am certain he has had a hurried conversation with a third party: his attitude is quite different. The Old World courtesy has returned, but he is businesslike, as if I am a task he has agreed to take on.
“Look, thinking this all through, I suggest we meet.”
“Do you want to come to Bangkok?”
“I don’t think that would answer our needs. Yours, anyway.”
“I don’t follow. What needs?”
“The story I have to tell is the strangest you’ll ever hear, that I can guarantee. It is frankly beyond anyone’s credulity, except that it’s true. I wouldn’t dream of sharing it with you unless I can show you the evidence at the same time. Seeing is believing. Thomas was the only disciple with a brain.”
I wonder if the biblical reference has anything to do with his name. “So, what? Shall I come to Saigon?”
“No. There’s no evidence here either. I’m afraid we’ll have to meet in Phnom Penh-I’m going to have to take you up-country.” He utters this last sentence with a sigh, as if under constraint. “How soon can you get there?”
“Phnom Penh? The flight lasts about one hour, there are flights about every hour or two. Give a couple of hours either end, plus time to reach the airport-I suppose I could be there by early evening tomorrow.”
“I’ll fly from Saigon. Stay at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I’ll do the same.” A pause. “I suppose you’ve begun to have an idea of how big this is, Detective? You’re like a man who went fishing for trout and caught a whale.”
Part 2
19
In Phnom Penh Dr. Christmas Bride has booked us into the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, with splendid views over the river, just before it joins the Mekong. Actually, it isn’t a foreign correspondents’ club at all, although the old colonial mansion (long verandahs, high ceilings, slow fans) looks the part. It is a private hotel named by its owner in honor of those intrepid reporters who used it as a base from which to file stories about the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, after Nixon and Kissinger destabilized the country with blanket bombing-as in Laos.
The riverside was wild and dangerous at that time, a great place to buy opium, heroin, and as many M-16s and AK-47s as you could carry before you got mugged by a gang carrying even more. Rape was the local sport, along with prostitution, child abuse, and knife fights. Now all that color has moved upstream somewhat, and loud, threatening posters proclaim in English draconian penalties for anyone caught with underage children. There’s not a lot of enforcement against local transgressors, however: the campaign is targeting Western men in the hope of jailing them before they return home and abuse European kids; the posters are paid for in euros, after all.
Despite that Cambodia is only an hour by plane from Bangkok, once you add on the rituals of security and state control (they take a mug shot at both ends, you are not allowed to smile or wear glasses) you end up with half a day of travel, which is why the sun is going down even though I left home this morning.
It’s still hot, though, hotter than Bangkok, and despite the fans an overwhelming lethargy pins me to my wicker seat in the bar of the FCC, so that all I can do is watch a fisherman with a throw net stand in his boat on the river and cast away just as if the city has grown up around him over the past few hundred years and will no doubt crumble in due course without any effect on his fishing style, or indeed any claim on his attention at all. I order a glass of cold white wine and give myself a moment to think. Travel is a stressful bore these days, and I’ve spent most of the last few hours checking my passport, completing visa applications, checking that I’ve not contaminated clothes or luggage with powder from my gun, which of course I could not take (they can pick up a single molecule of saltpeter with those floppy wands they wave all over your bags; if they find any they torture you with interrogations for the next few days). What I am wondering now is, so to speak, merely a lowercase version of my life’s most constant theme: What am I doing here? I have come on the strength of a single phone call with someone in Saigon. But his name is Christmas Bride. Now an old farang man enters the bar.
He who I have come to meet is over six foot and skinny in khaki walking shorts, money belt, and T-shirt. Long white hair springs out from his head in all directions. Polar-blue eyes. I am sure much vigor remains in that eighty-something body, but it is the long mobile face one fixes on. Tragic craters transform into blooming smiles that fade into whimsy; a gaze of half-focused benevolence tightens into an interrogator’s stare; the mouth taughtens and looks vicious, only to relax again into a grin, which replays every nuance of every kind of grin from sardonic, cynical, cruel to naïve, happy, vulnerable-and back again. The mind behind it all has known and lived every major event in the history of the human psyche from Adam to Mickey Mouse. He is a walking history of consciousness, starting with reptiles and including congress with angels. He is the kind of man you assume is insane until someone tells you he is a psychiatrist from the sixties, when you say, Oh, right, one of them.