The Asset gives a grandfatherly smile and folds his arms over his stomach. “Then, when you did call him, he had to call me right away because I hadn’t told him about you and he didn’t know where you were coming from at all. What a laugh-he was mad as hell, but he forgave me. Poor old Doc. And I was the one who insisted he take you to the camp, because I wanted you to know everything, you are my only living blood relation on this earth, aside from that old guy in the hospital.”
“Tell me about the opium. It’s terribly injurious, especially for a man his age. Why doesn’t he use LSD all the time?”
The Asset gives me a shrewd look, as if I’ve stumbled on an inconvenient truth. “He takes the Spirit only rarely these days. Very rarely. You could even say he uses opium to avoid acid.”
“Why?”
“Because when he’s on LSD his demon takes over completely. That’s really what all this is about, you know.” The Asset lets this bomb drop with a yawn. “He sold his soul to the great demon of Angkor forty years ago on a ten-day acid binge, but he’ll never admit it.” He checks my face. “That doesn’t mean the project won’t succeed. The opposite. With a demon like that backing us, how can we lose? The Khmer spirits are taking over the world again, using the weapon they know best: magic.” He smiles conspiratorially: “It’s quite fun, isn’t it?”
I realize that, outlandish though it seems, this is as sincere as the Asset is able to be. He really means that he is the Messiah. Frankly, R, I am experiencing the original policeman’s hell here: stuck with a perp who won’t stop confessing and no power of arrest.
“But Jesus, you are not Jesus,” I say. “You murder, you intimidate, you mutilate, you hypnotize men into killing their nearest and dearest, you scared my wife half to death, you are a war machine-” I stop, ashamed of my own exasperation.
“Hmm, the military lobby does keep cropping up, doesn’t it? It’s a concession we had to make. The Doc says I’ll grow out of the boy-soldier stuff pretty soon now. I’m sorry I scared your wife, it’s a kind of reflex they taught us.”
“What is?”
“Scaring the shit out of people: psychic dominance, to give it its military title. It’s quite clever, it involves all sorts of subtle factors like standing at a certain distance, control over facial features, total physical superiority, posture, and something you do with your eyes that isn’t mystical but looks it, then you call attention to the very sensitive area around the mark’s navel, which is a terrific fear center-and basically you convince the mark that you have killed many times before and might be about to do so again, which isn’t difficult when it’s true. It’s part of riot-control training. You pick a pack leader and reduce him to a whimpering wreck without even touching him. Very effective.”
“But the killings?”
“Dy yang sia yang,” he says in a perfect Thai accent. Roughly translated: You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs. “If I killed them, it must have been the will of God, mustn’t it? The Doc and I talked about that a lot. ‘Transcend killing by turning it into an art form,’ he advised. ‘Everyone has to die, but not everyone dies in the form of a handcrafted masterpiece-think of your victims as privileged to be killed by you. Above all, the Messiah is an artist.’ ”
“Dr. Christmas Bride said that?”
“Mm, when he was on acid, the old devil.” He gives me a grand smile. “Anyway, I don’t do violence anymore, I’m bored with it.”
“Since when?”
“Since I killed Sakagorn and Goldman. Just one little murder of the right person in the right place at the right time did the trick. What a liberation! My evolution has speeded up, just as the Doc predicted. You must have noticed. In a couple of months I’ll be the type who bursts into tears at the sight of a dead sparrow. But there is one thing I owe you, isn’t there? One more gesture before I slouch over to Bethlehem to be reborn.”
“What’s that?”
“This,” the Asset says, and reaches behind his head to remove his graphene mask. It is a striptease: slowly a wide brow emerges, then eyebrows, then the eyes…He completes the unveiling with a quick pull, and now, finally, I am looking into the face of the devil, who could also be Christ. I cover my mouth. “Oh, no!”
It is simply too much. The poor mind eternally misled by everything thanks to the myth of the normal, the ordinary, is now confronted by the impossible, the extraordinary-and does its best to turn off. I’m holding on to the swing, white-knuckled with stress, wonder, and horror, for it is the face of Dr. Christmas Bride! Not, to be sure, aged eighty-plus, but that Bride of the ancient photo taken with a Kodachrome more than fifty years ago: young, godlike, brilliant, and mad.
“God made me in his own image,” the Asset says, a tad forlorn. “I’ve never shown anyone before, only you and the Doc know. What do you think?”
“How did he do it? Plastic surgery isn’t that advanced. Are you sure that’s not another mask under the mask?”
“Genius always finds a way,” he says, still in that slightly doubtful tone. He shrugs, smiles, and replaces the graphene mask. Just then the doorbell rings.
“Ah!” he says.
We return to the house and he uses a remote to open the front door. Footsteps in the hall.
–
I am able to guess who it is, for the occasion, which is religious, calls for a specific kind of devotee, one whose dedication is blind and therefore absolute.
“Matthew,” the Asset says with a smile. “On time as usual.”
The FBI is not Thai and yet he offers that most perfect expression of local devotion known as the high wai. He raises palms pressed together as high as his forehead and smiles at the Asset with uncritical adoration that seems to say, Kill me if it be your pleasure, I will never know a greater god than you.
Or something like that. It’s a little embarrassing, but also impressive. He gives me the high wai, too, I guess to acknowledge me as God’s half brother. This is heady stuff. I find my imagination channeling what one knows about the origin of churches: a small group of dedicated followers with a message so powerful it redirects humanity. The sort of community, in other words, that pariahs like me never join. The Asset flashes me a look as if he knows what I’m thinking.
“Matthew,” he says and puts an arm around the FBI, “there’s one special little thing I’d like you to do for me, right now. I want you to tell my dearly beloved brother your story-in that succinct lawyer’s way of yours. Just the essential parts. He is a very quick study, essentials only will do.”
I do not think the moment has been rehearsed; it didn’t need to be. Fanatics have only one song to sing, and they don’t need much prompting.
“I was lost,” the FBI confesses. “A man, my father, escapes the corrupt, criminal, despotic, repressive police state of China and lands in the corrupt, criminal, despotic, repressive police state of the USA. What formula for survival does he pass on to his son? It is this: Above all, be impeccable in your hypocrisy, let not a drop of the human seep out of the polythene with which you have packaged yourself. Replace affection with Teflon, love with ambition, fairness with ruthlessness, the milk of human kindness with the acid needed to burn your way to the top. And never let your agony show.”