As he strides toward me with the purposeful grace of yesteryear, hand outstretched, his expression now is deeply and gratefully welcoming, promising hospitality and sensitivity of the highest order.
“Thank you so much for coming,” he says in that same tone I first heard on the phone: cultured, clear, beautiful, without the snobbery an inferior soul might express with that Brahmin accent. “Awful bloody trip, isn’t it? What are you drinking? Wine? I think I need a double scotch on the rocks.” He calls for a waiter using fluent Khmer.
The charm works. I am relaxed, impressed, instantly well-disposed without being intimidated. I am charmed into leaving the narrative, and the explanation, to him. We sit opposite each other at my table on the terrace.
“Names are important, so we should not dispense with the ritual. I am Christmas Bride, at your service.”
“I am Sonchai Jitpleecheep.”
He bends his head to grasp his chin with a large ruddy hand, frowns. “Hmm. I don’t know much Thai, but why Sonchai-not Somchai? Somchai is the common name, no?”
“Somchai is the common name. Sonchai means to think or dream. Apparently it arises from a mistake my father made.”
“Ah-ha! Sonchai means to dream? And Jitpleecheep is pretty much unpronounceable for the Western tongue.” I smile. “So you are a dreamer camouflaged from one half of yourself-not to mention the world?”
“Got it in one,” I say.
Bride takes out a packet of Camel cigarettes, knocks one out, fits it to an ivory cigarette holder, and lights up with a Zippo. He speaks through the first burst of smoke. “Oh, no, please. I’m not being clever here. I’m admiring your clever labeling. You’ve used the barricade to grow behind it beautifully-and in secret-that’s the key. Just imagine being lumbered with a moniker like mine.” Now the cratered face descends into tragedy tinged with rage. “The bitch was a Catholic of the old school, you see? She’d probably be illegal today.” He glares. “Christmas? And coupled with Bride? She thought she was nailing me to the cross at the baptismal font for the duration. I promise you, with a name like that you either crawl under a rock at age twelve and stay there, or you-” He stops himself and smiles.
“Drop acid more than a thousand times and kill God?”
His face is transfused with delight. “Excellent. Excellent. You play the apostate inadequate, then, when the timing’s right: wham! Fantastic life ploy-wish I’d known of it when I was your age. You must be one demon of a detective.” He drops his voice and leans forward. “So, you met dear old Joe Goldman. How was he with you?”
“I watched him through radar for about ten minutes. He was rather involved with the task in hand. He didn’t pay me any attention. Then we met again when he showed a promotional video at his apartment in Bangkok. That’s all.”
He nods. “I have the feeling this is a new field for you. Let me tell you, spies are fascinating, one of those professions like prostitution that has never been properly studied, perhaps because of what it reveals about the world we have made. Goldman is a more or less standard example.”
“But your relationship with him is what? How do you know so much? What is going on? Why am I sitting here talking to you in Phnom Penh?”
He takes a long toke on his Camel while he eyes me shrewdly. “Since when has the acquiring of knowledge and experience been that simple, Detective?”
I make signs of frustration. He turns his head to one side and lets some beats pass. “It really is just as I said over the phone. There is no technique for explaining all this in a way that anyone would believe, let alone a trained detective. I beg you to allow me to narrate the thing in my own way.” I do not ask, But why would you want to explain it at all to a total stranger from Bangkok? I nod instead. “Good. Tonight the prologue, tomorrow the story and the evidence.” He orders another double scotch, leans back in the wicker seat, stares out over the river for a good few minutes, takes a long toke on the Camel, then begins:
–
“Let us go back in time by half a century. We are somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties, our sample subject has been brought up according to the old WASP catechism: it’s basically old-fashioned sexism and racism, but the takeaway message is that democracy only works when it is undemocratically controlled by fat wise old white male Protestants. Socialism is the ultimate evil, which you must be prepared to die fighting against if you want to call yourself an American. Oh, yes, I forgot. There’s also the best-friend syndrome. A best friend is of the same WASP background as you to the point where he is indistinguishable from you. You will not at any time feel the slightest sexual attraction to your designated best friend, but you will be prepared to die for him if necessary.”
He pulls on the cigarette, inhales, exhales with relief and gratitude.
“Don’t believe what they tell you about tobacco. Without it I’d have died of boredom twenty years ago. It’s just a question of not overdoing it-we need wisdom, in other words, and there’s precious little of that left in the world.” He points to the pack he had placed on the table. “A habit my American friends taught me in the jungle. Do you see, the animal on the front is not a two-hump Bactrian camel as one would have expected, but a dromedary? The manufacturers knew that, of course, but were advised by industrial psychologists that one hump was somehow easier for the average Joe to take in than two. A primitive example of mind control-we’ve come a long way since then.” He sighs. “Not that we Brits are in any way innocent, you understand? I don’t mean to imply that. Every dirty trick in the book they learned from us.” He muses. “As a matter of fact, there are very few serious geopolitical problems today that were not created by the Foreign Office in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kashmir is probably the best example, after Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Tibet, sub-Saharan Africa, and pretty much the whole of the Near and Middle East. In Tasmania we annihilated a complete race of humans. That all happened when we were civilized Christians, of course.”
“What are you saying, Doctor?”
“What am I saying? I’m saying that when we consider a case like-well, let’s call him Private Jack Doe as a twenty-year-old GI-we need to strip out a few erroneous assumptions, like he gives a damn about democracy or the plight of third-world Asians, or even has an idea of what those words might mean, or even has a precise idea where Vietnam is. Or is even aware of the excuse for being there at all, except that Uncle Sam knows best. You see, in a nutshell such a background is essentially tribal and shamanic. A lot closer to the mind-set of Crazy Horse or Red Cloud than anyone cares to acknowledge.”
“But who exactly are you talking about when you refer to this hypothetical Private Jack Doe?”
He pauses, waves a hand, says, “Later,” and continues. “Then some truly world-class idiot grabs Jack and half a million like him and sends them to the other side of the world to kill as many fellow humans as he can manage. If he wants to know why, it is explained using a metaphor from infancy: dominoes. Almost from the start Westmoreland and the CIA turned it into a body-count war, which is to say a war of extermination.