The Bangkok Asset: A novel (21 page)

N
ext morning I rejoined Dr. Bride in his suite. Given his repertoire of personalities, I was curious as to who he might be after his opium binge. What I found first was an elderly and kindly sage, in awe of the life he had led. As an identity it was not particularly convincing; as a posture, though, it was highly attractive. I was put in mind not of the man he really was so much as the man he might have been if not for ’Nam.

“I’ve ordered breakfast,” he said. “Shall we have it on the balcony?”

We shifted chairs around a small marble table, then the breakfast arrived: stainless steel coffee and milk pots, Danish pastries, croissants,
pains au chocolat,
cheese, eggs, and cold cuts. The waiter poured the coffee and left.

“Myths,” Dr. Christmas Bride said. “One really cannot do without them. How are you on Faust?”

“Faust? Pact with the devil?”

“Exactly,” the Doctor said.

“Oh, Buddha.”

“Yes, quite,” Bride said. He waved a hand at the assorted clumps of humans down below in the square in front of the Opera House. “Look at them,” he said, “What do they all have in common?”

“Not a lot,” I muttered.

“On the contrary, they have one vital thing in common. They are all more or less innocent. The tourists, the beggars, the cyclo riders, they all look out on the world with innocence and bewilderment. The poor are bewildered by their suffering, the wealthy by their privileges, but none really want to do harm, in their own way they all want to return to the same heaven you and I visited last night. We inherit a quite manic certainty that such happiness is possible, indeed it always seems to be just around the corner. All great thinkers have wondered at this mystery—except the modern ones. Something about industrial societies causes us to despise innocence at the same time as encouraging everyone to pursue happiness, when it’s perfectly obvious you can’t have one without the other. It’s very odd.”

“I’m lost. What are you talking about?”

He gazed out over the street, his jaw working. “In dismantling human beings, chemically, socially, psychologically, we made the same discovery, Goldman and I. Without this obsession with achieving happiness, without the carrot an inch or two out of reach but tantalizingly close—you end up with dispirited zombies, useless for operational purposes. Fit only for YouTube disinformation.”

“Okay.”

“So both Goldman and I found ourselves working at the same problem, from different perspectives. I was intent on healing, he on developing a human war machine. In both cases we came up against the same mystery.”

“Yes?”

He chuckled. “Goldman is not a philosopher or a psychiatrist or a deep thinker. In the end he came to the only human being who was in a position to help. Me.”

“Yes?”

“The answer was simply too much, too terrifying, too awful in the style of Oppenheimer’s terrible quote from the Bhagavad Gita—
‘I have become Time, slayer of worlds’
—only infinitely worse. Oppenheimer only destroyed bodies and buildings. What I had discovered destroyed souls.” He let a long time pass, during which I sneaked looks at him from the corner of my eye. He seemed racked by a spiritual torment that would not let go. Finally he shook himself like a dog and stared at me. “When they realized there were going to be children born in the camp, they changed their attitude,” he said.

As if that constituted a full and final confession, he sagged back into his chair. I was left none the wiser. He raised his ancient head that now looked something like that of a vulture with spare skin hanging at the jowls.

“I would never have consented, d’you see? I held off until I saw what they were doing to the kids.”

“You mean after they took them away?”

“It was a gift they had only dreamed of. Young people without any national or cultural identity, with no legal existence at all, who if they belonged to anyone belonged to the CIA, in a country where children were looked on as chattels anyway. I told them, ‘No, no, you don’t make functional people like that. Not with sadistic exercise, enhancements and war games—too superficial, children are deep.’ ” He moaned softly to himself; I was not sure if he was expressing pleasure or pain. “They cited the Spartans. That’s when I seized the moment. I said, ‘Are you crazy? D’you have any idea what intricate and extensive mythology filled the head of a Spartan lad? In exchange for a grim material world, he lived in an inner world of gods and heroes, another kind of consciousness. For such a warrior the only purpose of life was to provide the opportunity for an honorable death. You have to start with the mind, the psyche—the body will follow. Enhance the body by all means, but don’t meddle with the mind, you’re simply not qualified.’ ” Another moan. “The first of their very sad and pathetic failures had come to light. A kid with an enhanced body who was too confused to get out of bed. A head case for life. A disaster. They said to me, ‘Okay, do it your way.’ They were scared because of what had happened to their star zombie. I said, ‘It has to be the archetypes, gods and heroes, a Jungian education. Magic is part of it.’ ” A pause while he worked his jaw. “They literally stopped up their ears: ‘Don’t tell us, keep your mumbo-jumbo to yourself, we’ll make a contract, you take the kids, you deliver them at age sixteen, we take it from there.’ ” He raised his hands and dropped them.

There was no point trying to goad him on. I waited. He took a deep breath. “So I worked with Goldman. He played General Groves to my Oppenheimer. We both realized independently that trying to capture or define the human spirit was a pointless exercise. The way forward was to indulge it.”

“Indulge it? Like indulging an animal in its favorite food?”

“Exactly. I’m afraid it was exactly like that. Except that we are here talking about psychic food. A kind of nourishment peculiar to human beings.” A pause. “A form of nourishment well studied by those societies we are taught to despise in modern times. A form of nourishment someone like Hitler or Himmler might have understood, although they were no more than beginners, dark clowns nibbling at the edges who quickly became victims of their own meddling.” He looked at me. His voice shook. He was a quite different kind of old man when he said,
“We discovered the rage of fragments cut off from the whole and the way to harness it.”
He could not keep the triumph out of his voice.

Now he stared at me like a madman. “The awful thing was that it worked. D’you see? I think even Goldman hoped it was not so. Unfortunately, we had found the God particle on the psychological level, which is the only level that matters. Suddenly the whole of human history fell into place, human sacrifice by another name: Aztecs, Romans, Nazis, European colonists, American imperialists, video games, endless holocausts.” He shook his head. “Goldman went mad. Even now he is only sane fifty percent of the time. That’s why the CIA tries to keep him at a distance. But they cannot do without him. He is the only one they have who fully understands the new weapon system.”

“So why not dump the new weapon system?”

He smiled wryly. “D’you know, I think they would like to do just that. But they cannot. Competition, d’you see? You can’t stop arms races once they start—the logic is irresistible.”

“But a race with whom?”

“Do you really think the Americans are the only ones working on this? Experiments on helpless humans is universal wherever there is an absence of democratic surveillance, which is everywhere because democracy is failing. The Japanese did it in World War II, the Russians did it led by Professor Ilya Ivanov under Stalin in the twenties and carried it on in secret after Ivanov died: the so-called
humanzee
project. Now the new player is China. They have made a lot of progress, but they’re coming from way behind. They have no comparable program, but their need is great. This kind of weapon is more suited to homeland security than war. Soon there will be two billion people in the PRC, just when food and fuel start to run out, worldwide. Keeping the peace, putting down riots with muscle—that’s the policing and soldiering of the future. A normal man who has been trained to kill cannot manage more than a few hundred slaughters without breaking down. Himmler discovered that.”

A long pause during which his gargoyle returned. His expression was pop-eyed, triumphant and vicious now. “In fact, that was the main problem they wanted me to solve: how do you kill relatedness between humans so that a single warrior can go on killing without any psychological fallout?” He smiled. “It was such an intriguing puzzle, I couldn’t resist the challenge. Then I came up with the answer. Do we worry unduly that literally billions of animals—cows, sheep, chickens, pigs—are killed on our behalf every day? It does not trouble us because of the differentiation of species.” He stopped to check I was following. He was eager to share his brilliance. “I said: ‘I will make them gods, for the gods never care how many little humans they destroy.’ ” He shook his head. “And that’s what I did. After all, what is identity other than a subjective certainty based on no evidence at all? A manipulable fantasy, in other words. Descartes didn’t dig deep enough. It would have been smarter to say,
I think therefore I am not,
since honest thought destroys identity. A Buddhist like you knows that.”

“So you created a new species?”

“Yes.” He warms to his theme. “Naturally, I gave them many of my own tastes in music, history, cuisine, and the arts—perhaps went a tad too far with the Counter-Reformation and the French Revolution, which are my favorites, along with metaphysical poetry and Renaissance choral music—but I was careful to give them a wide range of religions to choose from. Or they could be atheists, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were too different, too superior, ever to relate to normal people.” He let a couple of beats pass. “Even Goldman and his gang realize that seven billion people living on credit and surface tension is not a goer long-term. The transhuman has to be higher and deeper than that.”

My cop’s mind processed what he’d said despite myself. I, too, felt a terrible reluctance to see something that, I guess, many people sense but will not acknowledge. I thought again about that incident on the river. “It’s not actual killings that…feeds these…products?”

“No. It’s the destruction of the souls doing the killing. That’s what it feeds on. And you do have to feed it, regularly.”

“But feed who or what exactly? Something that is no longer human? So what is it?”

“Ah! How difficult it is for a modern man to answer that question, which a medieval man would have answered with confidence in a second.”

“You’re talking about the devil?”

“Aren’t you?”

I thought about that and decided to change the subject. I was on the point of leaving, after all, with the most pressing question still unanswered. “Doctor, may we now talk about the elephant in the room? Why have you gone to such lengths to help me understand all this? Surely not on the strength of one phone call from a Bangkok cop in the middle of the night?”

“I was asked to,” he said with a smile.

“Who by?”

He cocked his head. “Well, if we stick to the terminology, I suppose I would have to say the devil.” He stood up and disappeared into the interior of the suite for a moment, to return with his Camels, his ivory cigarette holder, and his Zippo. I watched and waited while he lit up. “Of course,” he said, coughing out a stream of smoke, “one has always to bear in mind that in the more sophisticated forms of Christianity, the devil is simply Christ seen from a different angle.”

An English gentleman to the last, later that morning Christmas Bride accompanied me to the airport, where I took the next flight back to Bangkok. While I was waiting airside I called Chanya to tell her a little about my adventures. She said she had had lunch with Krom while I was away, but did not elaborate.

I
t is a busy night at the Old Man’s Club and I am on my own: Mama Nong complains that I’ve managed to avoid my bar-minding duties for over a week already and she did not see why a couple of days in Cambodia should excuse me from my obligations as junior shareholder, which, she pointed out, pays better than my cop’s salary. When I’ve finally kicked out the last drunk and locked up and am looking forward to going home to my wife, my phone vibrates in my pocket:

Darling, I’m so incredibly f##**g bored and Krom just called to ask if I wanted to go see a show—so that’s what I’m doing. C.

The message hits me in a place that suffered collateral damage during the war of adolescence: nobody loves me and I feel lonely. My jealousy is of the self-pitying kind: I was looking forward to telling her all about my adventures in the jungle; but she is with Krom and our contract of intimacy has been compromised. I don’t want to go home to an empty hovel, so I decide to stroll instead while suppressing a voice of rage against Chanya for leaving me all alone late at night.
And she’s with that dyke Krom!

Sukhumvit has changed. Most of the bars have closed after the one a.m. curfew; those that have remained open have locked their doors and will only allow entrance to
farang
or those Thais with the correct password. The luckier girls found customers and are either in a hotel bed somewhere if the deal was for “all night” or snug in their own beds if it was merely
chuakrao
or short time. The rest are hanging out at a long line of collapsible tables and chairs placed around makeshift bars on the sidewalk that have suddenly appeared and stretch, with intermissions, for over a mile. Fortune-tellers also have emerged from whatever underworld they inhabit during the day: a square of dark cloth on the ground, some Hindu diagrams of the body, some Buddhist diagrams of the mind, a couple of packs of well-worn tarot cards, a guide to palm reading, and you’re set up as a clairvoyant, or
mordu,
of the night. It’s a clever piece of targeting: almost every girl who is still around at this time is feeling down on her luck and needs reassurance. Generally, though, the ladies of the night resort to the more reliable relief of a bottle of rice whiskey shared among friends. At the same time I’m wondering in some dark alley of the heart,
Are they having sex together right now, Chanya and Krom, this minute, while I’m walking along?

Nothing like self-regard to strip you of your street smarts: I do not hear the car roll up, or the door open and close, or quick steps behind me. I do not even realize I am no longer alone until a feline caress begins at the base of my spine. Even then I assume it is a girl risking all on the last chance of the night; I turn with a
Sorry, darling
smile on my face. It is him.

He is taller than me by about four inches with a proportionate advantage in body mass. It is his superhuman fitness, though, that intimidates. I do not feel threatened—I do not think he is about to kill me—but I am unmanned. He walks beside me with effortlessness grace, while I immediately begin to sweat and my pulse rate increases. When he takes my arm I’m unsure how to react: to pull away might be offensive; on the other hand, that gentle but firm hold on my right forearm is freaking me out. Now he leans over to me to whisper a sweet nothing in my ear:

“ ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee before I knew thy face or name, so angels affect us oft.’ ”

He smiles into my shock. It is important, though, to keep walking. “I know you’re a compulsive, like me,” he whispers. “You’ve read everything in your search for self, haven’t you? But it’s time you realized something very important.”

“What?”

He wants me to look him in the face again, but I am unable to. That pale skin, slightly tanned, those cornflower-blue eyes, that short hair so blond it is almost white: the eerie beauty that came over in the video clip is tripled in real life. A trillion dollars of
farang
brainwashing from Hollywood is telling me how perfect he is, theoretically. I need to keep walking with my eyes focused on the pavement, like a woman propositioned by a strange man late at night.

“That old man in the hospital, our biological father, he can’t tell you anything about yourself,” he whispers in my ear. “He is the past. He has no relevance anymore. We are on our own in the world, you and I. We need to bond.” He speaks gently, as if to a child. “Don’t be frightened of me. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything. You’re all I have, my love. All I have on this great wide earth.” He hesitates. “This
sterile promontory,
as the poet said.” He leans around as we walk to produce a caring, loving smile right in my face. I cannot do other than to give a half smile back. Fear aside, the sense of being trapped in a submissive female role is profoundly irritating, but even if I had not seen what that superbody can do, his superior training and strength are too obvious, too much a part of his reality to ignore.

He sighs. “It’s okay, I understand, this is all very new to you. How did you like the camp, though? What a dump, huh?” He makes a face that I suppose is intended to be nonchalant. “Oh, how I wish you could have seen it at its height, with us kids running around, everything shipshape, spick and span, every day a holiday. Football, baseball, fencing, athletics, classical music, poetry—we were all so smart, you see, junk culture could not seduce us, for the Doc had inculcated us with his own tastes in the arts—cries of joy, our little souls overwhelmed by our great good fortune all the livelong day. It was our holiday camp long, long ago. That’s where I met our daddy for the first time…I wanted so much to be there with you when you visited, but they told me, ‘No, it’s too soon, the poor love has to catch up with things you’ve known all your life.’ ”

He stops to hold my shoulders and turns me to face him full frontal, smiles again with tolerance and patience, like a lover who does not doubt his wooing will win out in the end. “Don’t you want to thank me for setting it all up for you? You do know it was me all along, don’t you?”

“Ah, yes, I think I worked that out. The iPhone was yours, there was only one entry in Contacts, I called it. Yes, you set it all up brilliantly.”

He smiles and looks as if he is about to pinch my cheek, so pleased is he with me. “I can wait, oh yes I can wait, but you have to let me share my little treats with you. One by one, not all at once, naturally. The
last
thing I want is to freak you out.”

I am focused on his voice now; light, silky, freshly washed, not a trace of blue-collar masculinity; not a soldier’s voice at all. It sings a song of vacancy. Is that a howl I hear behind it all? Is this really my brother? I feel his antiseptic need like a steel band around my head, tightening. This must be the demonic motivation Dr. Bride spoke of: the vacuum from which all life flees.

Only now I become aware of the car that has been following us. It is exceptionally quiet because it is a sky-blue Rolls-Royce. Now it slides up to stop with the rear near-side door perfectly aligned with us. The door opens. “Please, my dearest brother,” he says and jerks his chin.

I enter a HiSo world of aromatic leather, discreet perfume, air-conditioning at a pleasant twenty-three centigrade, and the famous barrister Lord Sakagorn dressed in a dinner jacket with plum bow tie, his long hair held back in a new silver clip, sitting in the front passenger seat, his liveried driver at the wheel.

“Are you excited?” the Asset asks me. “You’re going to see your kid brother strut his stuff—not all of it, just a little exhibition to help with sales, isn’t that right, Lord Sakagorn?”

Sakagorn is almost dumb with embarrassment. “Yes,” he manages and sags. “Yes, that’s right.”

Next to me in the backseat the Asset stretches out. He flashes me a smile. “Forgive me, my brother, I need to go into a different space now. I have to prepare. I might not have time for you until it’s over.” He closes his eyes and psychically disappears, leaving only that extraordinary body.

Silence as the limousine rolls through Chinatown. Normally there are gold shops with glittering lights and Sikh guards in turbans with pump-action shotguns on just about every corner, and hundreds of small clothes stalls that take up the sidewalks and narrow the road; now, though, it is too late even for gold traders. We pass a couple of Chinese Christian churches that were founded before Constantine converted, a huge gaudy Taoist shrine, the Temple of the Gold Buddha, then a glimpse of the river. Fangton, the other bank, is the downmarket side where murders are more common and less expensive: I take comfort from the fact that this is Sakagorn’s Rolls-Royce and all the people we pass give it a second glance. A kidnap is unlikely. Now we take the bridge to cross the river.

“It’s a fight?” I ask Sakagorn. It is the obvious conclusion, after all. The Asset is quite still and appears not to have heard the question.

“Yes.”

“A kind of exhibition match?”

“You could say that.”

“Who—” I stop myself because I almost said
we.
“Who’s
he
fighting?”

“Rungkom.”

I gasp. “Oh no.”

Sakagorn doesn’t say anything, merely stares ahead into the night.

Rungkom retired as unbeaten Muay Thai national and international champion about five years ago. People wondered why he didn’t keep fighting for another few seasons, considering the amount of money he was making; there was a hint of moral weakness, whether women, drugs, or alcohol is unclear, although most gossips cited all three as probable causes. Everybody knew that Rungkom, a great bashful hulk from Isaan when he first started on his career, just loved to party with Krung Thep’s fashionable elite. The usual dark stories abounded, implying a dependency on cocaine and indebtedness to loan sharks. What I remembered of him in the ring was an incredible high kick with speed and feints that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was so fast and so hard, no one could figure out a response. Most of his fights ended in the first or second round. His face, rocky with scars, appears vividly in my mind as we drive to the fight. I recall that his path has taken a certain predictable turn since his retirement and drug dependency. He is by far and away our most popular and expensive private boxer: the kind rich men hire to fight bare-knuckle in secret locations where the betting starts at a million baht.

Sakagorn’s driver slows the car when we reach a ragged area where not much has been done to separate the land from the river, which flooded a few days ago, leaving a lot of mud and uninhabitable dirt between building projects that were ruined by the water. The driver knows where to stop thanks to two large halogen lamps that have been set up on the wasteland where a single white Lexus people mover is waiting with the lights on.

The barrister Sakagorn shakes his head. “Such a shame, such a sacrifice—but what can you do?” Suddenly he loses control. “Fuck you, Jitpleecheep, fuck you to hell.” I stare at him. “It didn’t have to be Rungkom, any bunch of hoodlums would have done. He could take out ten no problem. This is to impress
you.
” The Asset remains in deep meditation, oblivious.

We stop about a hundred feet from the Lexus and Sakagorn gets out of the Rolls. At the same time the sliding door of the Lexus opens and Goldman emerges. The halogen lamps catch the catastrophe that seven decades have wrought on the agent’s fat face. Unlike Sakagorn, though, he seems in fine fettle: a man in a rare mood eager to rock and roll. He waits for the aristocrat to approach him. I watch Sakagorn cross the waste ground. Lord Sakagorn seems to diminish in stature with each step. The two men do not
wai
or shake hands. Goldman sneers down at him while they speak.

Now I become aware of another vehicle, a huge Toyota Carryboy at the opposite end of the clearing, which I had not noticed because it sits in darkness. The internal lights flash on as doors open on either side. The mighty Rungkom and his trainer emerge, with two bodyguards. The athletic figure of the former Muay Thai star stands out, a superior being in his own right. When the doors shut and the light goes out, the fighter and his entourage of about six or seven are almost invisible. They stand near the truck and wait. Rungkom folds his arms and stands with his legs apart, steady as a rock in the shadows.

It becomes clear we are waiting for someone else. Lights of another vehicle arriving at the edge of the wasteland light up bits of ground, then pick out bits of the night sky as it bounces over debris. The new vehicle is a people mover, a Toyota that looks hired. Music and laughter burst from it when someone opens the sliding door at the back. The music is a mixture of Thai and Cantopop, the laughter both raucous and effeminate at the same time. Now Professor Chu emerges; both Goldman and Sakagorn rush to welcome him. While they are doing so, three exquisite
katoeys
also emerge, giggling and rasping simultaneously. They recognize Rungkom across the clearing lit up from the lights of their vehicle and
wai
him like a hero. Then they spot his opponent, the silent Asset who has emerged from Sakagorn’s Rolls to lean against it negligently. Who will die tonight? The
katoeys
give way to frivolity, as if the tense mood is something to be tasted like wine, then spat out again. But they follow the discipline of the bordello: their job is to take care of Chu; that is what he is paying for and those are seasoned professionals behind the baby-doll faces. They gather around him, searching his body language for clues as to how he wants to play this very exciting game.

Chu handles the social challenge by switching between personalities, one for the trannies, the other for Goldman and Sakagorn. I don’t think either of them were expecting the
katoeys,
but the Professor is a rep with enough spending power to buy an infinity of patience, assuming his anonymous client is the PRC; or, to be precise, one of its ministries. Sakagorn gives him the full
wai
that he normally only reserves for very HiSo locals; even Goldman is able to control himself enough to demonstrate a degree of charm. He bows to the Prof at the same time as taking one of his hands in both of his, as if making some kind of betrothal, then welcomes him in Mandarin. Chu accepts the homage without reciprocating. On the other hand, he responds to jokes, prods, and caresses by the
katoeys
like a teen on a first date. It is like watching a light go on and off, depending on whether he is addressing the
katoeys
or the two high-powered salesmen. The party pauses, though, when more headlights precede another visitor. The vehicle is a police van. As soon as it comes to a halt, the rear door slides open.