Everyone Burns (18 page)

“When, tomorrow?”

“Now.”

“
Now?
” I looked at my watch: it was after 10.30pm.

“Yes, now. I’m sorry. Can you?”

I quickly flipped over the pages of my mental Not-To-Do-List.
Do not under any circumstances meet Nittha Rattanakorn outside of the office.

“At my office, OK? In … let’s see … twenty minutes?”

“Thank you. I’ll see you there.”

Now what?

I should, of course, have said no. I should have been more professional, strict and objective. I should have told her that I had rules with clients, and that there were boundaries that had to be observed. I should have asked her whether it was a real emergency, or whether it could wait until Monday. I should have told myself that meeting the wife of a major mobster at night alone in my office was a bad idea. But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead I remembered how attractive and vulnerable she’d looked when I first met her a few days ago. Then I went back into the Pearl, paid my bill, gave Jingjai a big tip, patted my sullen companion’s shoulder condescendingly, and wished him good luck.

Riding my motorbike to the office I could have sworn for a moment I saw Klaus Vogel in the crowd surging into one of the nightclubs. But my eyes must have been playing tricks on me. Or maybe
, because I’d been talking to Jingjai, the German was on my mind and it was my brain playing tricks.

After all, Vogel had no reason to be back in Samui just yet, did he?

*       *       *       *       *

Nittha Rattanakorn was in a state of considerable agitation.

I guided her to the two-seater sofa in the East Office and sat down beside her. She was trembling and her breathing came in shallow gasps as she struggled to contain her emotion.

When I touched her wrist gently the tears came, and they kept on coming. She put her head on my shoulder and I put a solicitous arm around her. When she rested a hand on my thigh, however, I must confess I felt an inappropriate stiffening of muscle in the groin area. I patted her arm in what I hoped would be taken as an avuncular gesture.

“Just let it flow, Nittha, it’s all right.”

When her sobbing subsided and she lifted her head, my shirt was sodden with her tears.

I made us green tea while she composed herself. When I brought in the tray I thought it prudent to sit opposite her, since with a coffee table between us we were both afforded a measure of protection.

She told me her husband had flown off the island today on a business trip. The man who had been giving her attention – and who was a business associate of her husband’s – had seen this as an opportunity to take their relationship to a more physical level. When Nittha had made it plain that not only was that
not
going to happen, but that she didn’t want to see him again, he had taken it badly and become abusive.

She was so shaken by the experience that she needed to talk to someone so she could unburden herself.
Cue David Braddock
.

I explained quietly and calmly that she’d done the right thing, and that she shouldn’t feel embarrassed about crying in front of me. She took my hand, pressed it to her face and told me I was a good man.

I wasn’t so sure about that. If she could have read my thoughts, she may well have had a different opinion: a fit woman’s tears always make me feel protective and horny in equal measure. Fortunately she wasn’t a mind-reader.

I considered the two women I’d seen in my office that day: Kat, confident and independent; and Nittha, unsure and needy. Of the two, I had to be most careful with Nittha. A therapeutic relationship can produce dependency on the side of the client, which carries the danger of boundary violations and a quick descent to naked romps in hotel bedrooms.

I didn’t want to become a crutch for Nittha. Kat, on the other hand, had no need of a crutch – unless as a toy during unorthodox foreplay perhaps.

Before she left, Nittha said, “If I’m going to see you again, David, I think it’s only fair to tell you who I am.”

“I know who you are. You’re Nittha Rattanakorn; Thongchai Rattanakorn’s wife.”

“How long have you known?”

“From the beginning.”

*       *       *       *       *

“So you’re working weekends now?” said Claire when I eventually arrived home.

“I had an emergency call this evening and had to go into the office.”

“A woman, of course.”

“An upset lady, yes. She needed to talk.”

“That’s very chivalrous of you, David. Was there any hugging involved?”

“A little.”

“You will get yourself into trouble one of these days. It’s lucky I’m so understanding.”

“It is.”

I sat on the bed.

“I called Anna today,” I said.

“Anna?”

“Your sister.”

“I know she’s my sister. My question was rather
why
you had called her,” she said tersely.

I shrugged. “We haven’t spoken for a while.”

“What did she have to say?”

“She’s concerned about … well, about these conversations we have. And where it’s all going.”

“I’m concerned about the conversations we have.” She paused. “Maybe it’s about time we stopped having them.”

“Claire –”

“There was a time,” she continued, “when Anna and I used to talk about everything; when we had no secrets; when nothing was off-limits. Same as you and I used to be. But we have to face it that six years ago that all changed. It will never be that way again, David.”

I remained silent.

“I think it’s time I moved out permanently,” she said.

“Whoa, Claire.”

“Let’s face it, my darling, I’m only here some of the time anyway. A clean break would be better. I’m not just thinking of us; I’m thinking of Catherine too.”

“Don’t bring Katie into this,” I said angrily.

“She is already
in this
. You want the wife you used to have and she wants the mother she used to have. But that woman no longer exists, David. Times have changed. We all have to move on.”

“Claire, I’m not ready to let you go.”

“I know that. But you must.”

I looked into those beautiful sad eyes and said, “You are the love of my life. Whatever has happened, that doesn’t change. That will never change.”

“I’m the love of your last life, David. Now you have a new life. And I have somewhere else I should be too.” Her voice softened. “My being here is making you ill, my darling. In your mind, it’s making you ill. I
know
this. Just think about what I’m saying.”

“I can’t talk about this now, Claire. I’m sorry. I’m going for a cigarette.”

I stepped out onto the balcony and lit up, waiting for the thudding in my heart to ease off.

After a few minutes I went back inside.

Claire was gone.

6

“Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.”

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“You are not here either for devotion or meditation,” said a voice from behind me. “That much is obvious.”

I remained silent and motionless, so the Old Monk hit me across the back with his stick.

“Stop pretending,” he ordered. “You are wasting Buddha’s time. And mine.”

We were in the Wat Son garden. He sat down beside me and bummed a cigarette. After we’d lit up, he looked at me quizzically.

“Why are you here?”

“Everybody has to be somewhere.”

“That is not necessarily true. Perhaps you have come to think through your problems? To make them disappear?”

“Perhaps.”

“I can help you there. I am good at making things disappear. For instance,” he said, “You see that glass bottle?”

He pointed to the garden wall where a young monk was lounging against the other side, his back to us. The monk had evidently been sipping a cola drink and had placed the bottle on the wall while he buried his nose in a newspaper.

I nodded. “I see the bottle.”

The Old Monk stared at it fiercely for a moment. Then he banged his stick twice on the ground and turned to me. “There you are,” he said. “The bottle has gone.”

The bottle hadn’t moved.

“What is this?” I responded. “Jedi mind tricks?”

“I assure you,” he said calmly, “
there is no bottle.”

He rose and walked over to the wall. He picked up the bottle.

“Do you imagine I now hold a bottle in my hand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And am I now looking at it?”

“Yes.”

He rotated the bottle in his hand then dropped his half-smoked cigarette into it.

“How deluded you are.”

He clipped the young monk behind the ear and handed him the bottle. “This stuff would rot your brains if you had any,” he said.

The Old Monk walked back to me and sat down again. “You cannot solve your problems because you see them the same way you see the bottle. As discrete, as separate, as
other
to you. You fail to see that the bottle is not a thing
of itself.
The word ‘bottle’ is just a label attached for convenience. Yet you imagine there is such a thing as ‘bottle
-ness’
, that has intrinsic meaning?” He paused and sighed wearily. “I say again, there is no such thing as a bottle. It is because your mind is confused that you think you have problems.”

“I do have problems. And all your metaphysics won’t conjure them away.”

“Very well,” he said. “Supposing I humour you for the moment. What problems do you imagine you have?”

“For a start, I’m assisting on a murder investigation, and it’s giving me a headache. That’s highly confidential, by the way. The investigation I mean, not the headache.”

“Ah, now you begin to interest me. So you are engaged in some
real
detecting?”

“Yes, I am,” I said tetchily.

He traced a circle in the dust with the end of his stick. “You know Lord Buddha was a great detective?” he asked rhetorically. “He solved the greatest puzzle facing mankind: the cause of suffering, of
dukkha
, and how we can put an end to suffering. He sat under the Bodhi tree and resolved never to rise until he had found enlightenment. Such determination and single-mindedness were needed to solve this problem. These are the characteristics a great detective needs.” He looked at me sardonically and tut-tutted. “Your mind is too scattered at the moment to solve mysteries. You lack focus and discipline.”

The Old Monk had a point, I had to give him that. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the young monk dithering over whether to enter the garden and risk another whack. In the end he decided against and wandered off in the direction of the
wat, presumably seeking shade from the midday sun. It was, inevitably, another dry day on Samui.

“Does Buddha have
any more useful advice for unfocused detectives?”

“Oh yes,” he said emphatically. “A lot of useful advice. Are you familiar with the
Kalama Sutra
? It has some good parallels for you.”

I shook my head. While the Old Monk talked he continued to trace circles on the ground with his stick. His voice took on a dreamy quality, like a talking meditation.

“The
Kalama Sutra
is Lord Buddha’s charter on free inquiry. Every private investigator should read it and memorise its messages. The Kalamas asked the Enlightened One for guidance on how to recognise whether teachings that were given to them were right or wrong. He told them:
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it; or because it is in your traditions; or because many speak about it; or because it is found in your religious books; or because your teachers and elders believe it; or because you have become attached to it from habit
.

“Buddha thus counselled a wise caution, a form of constructive cynicism, if you will. He went on to say that you should observe and analyse for yourself. If you find that your conclusions are in accord with reason, then you should accept those findings and live by them.”

I thought about the source of my information on the murders. It was pretty much all Charoenkul and his boys, and of course his wife had done the translation and summary.
How objective was this information and how much of it was coloured by bias and error?
I really wanted to talk to Yai again, and to his grand-daughter.

I considered the anonymous letters in the same light. Other than the physical reality of the letters themselves, the remaining data I had to work on had all been generated inside my own head. If I couldn’t trust what others told me, could I trust what I told myself?

The Old Monk had stopped tracing circles on the ground and was turning them alternately into smiley faces and sad faces.

“Did you know this person who was murdered?” he asked.

“No. And it’s not just one person. Two people have been killed.”

“Did they have families?”

“One did.”

“So many problems in the world,” he said quietly, as if to himself.

He was silent for a while. He appeared to be contemplating the four happy faces and the four sad faces he had traced in the dust. I wondered what they meant, assuming they meant anything. The world of duality, perhaps? The world of
appearances
; in Buddhism known as the realm of
samsara
where everything you experience is an illusion?

“If you are going to solve your most important problem,” he said breaking the silence, “
you will have to adopt the Right View.”

“And what would that involve?” I asked.

The Old Monk looked at me with intensity, and spoke slowly. “Someday soon we should have a very specific conversation. There is something I need to communicate to you, but today is not the time. The ground of your mind is not prepared. Today we must speak of more mundane things, like death.”

He let out a sigh. He seemed sad.

“Give me a cigarette,” he said. He puffed for a minute before he continued.

“Lord Buddha spoke about the importance of reason; of working out things for yourself. His teaching he likened to a raft: useful to carry you across the river, but ultimately to be left behind when it became a burden. He was very pragmatic, and you must be too. You must apply reason and logic, but you must also be able to empty your mind of
the clutter of labels and boxes and categories. Your tendency to compartmentalise your life and the world into neat
segments
will get in the way of your finding a solution. You will lose your appreciation of the bigger picture. That’s what I meant by adopting the Right View.”

“OK,” I said, “
so I should sweat the details, but not lose sight of the wood for the trees, right? I know that.”

“I am talking about more than that. I’m saying that if you can free your mind of the artificial construct of
things
, you will see what is really happening in the world. A mind that is empty is
interconnected
. In Buddhism we sometimes use the image of the Jewel Net of Indra to illustrate this point. Imagine an immense three-dimensional net with a mirror attached at each and every connecting point. Each mirror would reflect the image of every other mirror and so on to infinity.

“You are one of those mirrors, but in a sense you are also all of those mirrors, because everything is a reflection of everything else. Because our mind and our self have no effective substance, we are all multi-centred and interconnected; like the reflections of mirrors in mirrors.”

“That’s a very pretty picture,” I said, “But I don’t see how it helps to tell me that the world as we know it is just a hotchpotch of unrelated images.” I wagged my cigarette in what I hoped was an ironic fashion.

“If you would stop only listening with your ears you might understand better,” he said gruffly. “Let me spell it out for you. The images are
not
unrelated.
Everything is connected. Everyone is connected. Everyone and everything is interconnected.
Crime, punishment, you, me, this island, the Three Fires of Buddhism, history, the weather, elephants, the National Elections, a cola bottle,
everything
. Your analysis of your problem will be based on individual
things
, but your solution will lie in the interdependency of
everything
.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and looked suddenly tired; like a man daunted by the task before him. However, he rallied and went on. “Study the doctrine of
Dependent Origination
. Everything has a cause and everything has an effect. For me, this is the true meaning of karma.”

“So, to summarise,” I said brightly and somewhat flippantly, “
first, I should trust no-one, because everybody lies, and instead I should make my own inquiries and observations. Second, I need to do an analysis of the facts, but I shouldn’t get bogged down in them. Third, I am already somehow connected to the murderer; I just have to figure out how. You know, you should write a manual for murder detectives.”

“As to that, I have no interest in murders. I offer a recipe for life, not for solving crimes.”

I looked at him sharply. “I thought you were talking about the murder cases,” I said.

The Old Monk snorted. “I don’t know what gave you that idea,” he said. “Your mind has an eccentric understanding of gravity: it circles a dead planet. I was referring to
Your Problem.”

“My problem is the murder cases.”

“I think not.” The Old Monk took his stick and scrubbed out the pictures of the faces.

“So what is
My Problem
?” I asked peevishly.

“Another time,” he said rising.

I was annoyed now, and felt a juvenile impulse to retaliate. I tried quickly to think of something to say. This was the best I could come up with. “So before we meet ‘another time’,” I said, “I have something for you to think about. Consider this.
Why is a raven like a writing-desk?
”

He bowed solemnly. “I shal
l give the question my full consideration.”

*       *       *       *       *

I’d started the day early, staking out Jingjai’s place as atonement for my lamentable failure of the previous evening to behave as a professional PI.

I was sitting outside her apartment block in the jeep by 8.00am, puffing on a Marlboro and sipping a takeaway coffee. Of course she
could
have had an overnight visitor who had left before that time, but I doubted it. Certainly not the dull-as-ditchwater Mancunian. I wondered if he’d be back in the
Pearl
again tonight, the poor bastard.

Around 10.30am Jingjai appeared on the street, alone and on foot. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, was casually dressed and sported a baseball cap. She looked like a boy. She didn’t notice me as she walked to a nearby fruit and vegetable stall, made a few purchases and chatted for a few minutes. Then she went back inside the apartment building. A couple of minutes later I saw curtains drawn back and her face briefly at the window. I could now identify her flat.

No farang had come out of the building in the two-and-a-half hours I’d been sitting around. I’d waited another hour for nothing to happen, then drove to the temple.

*       *       *       *       *

My temple visit and lecture from the Old Monk being over, I had some time to kill before my rendezvous with Bee. I drove half-way to Lamai and pulled the jeep off the road at a grass-roofed eating hole that overlooked the sea. I sat at a table made from driftwood, ordered a beer and lit up while I perused the interestingly-worded menu. It read
If you have ever had crabs
,
you will like it here. Our friendly staff is always ready to service you.