The Bangkok Asset: A novel (3 page)

Now I was sure he was not human. The swim was impressive enough, but to retain the strength to haul his considerable bulk up the vertical rope quickly and easily for about thirty feet without a pause, even with the help of the knots…that spoke of something else.

“Like something out of a superhero comic,” I muttered to Krom, who gave me a curious look.

When the swimmer popped his head over the embankment I expected the two Americans to embrace to celebrate the athlete’s survival, or at least make high fives, but as soon as Goldman saw that his man was safe on the bank he beckoned him to follow as he returned with long, hurried strides to the first rope that was holding the boat with the Thais on board. I could not help staring at the physical prodigy on the screen who had just swum across our wildest river in a rage. I wondered why he didn’t lie down on the sidewalk, or at least lean against the railings breathing heavily. He simply followed the huge American at a kind of warm-up trot until he joined him at the stanchion to which the line was tied fast.

A sudden squall began to tear the mist into floating filigree. The Satnav machine fired up those pixels as it switched automatically to color. The definition of the Chinese gadget was amazing in its precision: every shade, every facial expression, every detail was better than the best HD I’d seen. There was even a touch of the surreal in its precision, as if we had those people in a box right on the dashboard of the van.

Goldman stood upright and seemed to yell something at his Asset at the same time as handing him some object that looked like a Swiss Army knife from his pants pocket, then clapped his hands. I frowned in disbelief. Inspector Krom played with the controls to zoom in on what he was doing.

What I retain of that moment is the precision with which the swimmer cut the rope. He sawed away while bending over it, like a man who is determined to do a perfect job. He stepped back the instant the rope started to fray of its own accord. The strands unraveled: the rope and the boat were gone.

“We’ll have to get out of here before they see us,” the Inspector muttered. “This isn’t meant to be a demonstration. Now it’s all over, they might start looking around. It’s important they don’t know we’re here.” But she made no effort to move just yet. Instead we watched the huge old American and his young prodigy giving the raging torrent one last glance. “I guess even if they do look this way, all they’re going to see is a wet van.”

The younger man was stunning in his beauty, with a perfect physique, about six two with Hollywood good looks and cropped hair so blond it was almost white. Still soaked in shorts and T-shirt, he didn’t even shiver. When he looked up at the sky for a brief moment I saw eyes of mystic cornflower blue. But he seemed to give off nothing in the way of vibrations or mood, like someone emotionally invisible.

Inspector Krom, her tongue pressing against her front teeth, began to pan across the scene until she found what she wanted and grunted in satisfaction. Now we were looking at a camera team of two huddled on a bridge upstream. Their camera with giant zoom on a tripod was focused like a cannon on the point at which Goldman and his disciple were standing. They were so done up in padded waterproofs that they were bloated spheres; no mistake about it, though, they were both Chinese. What kind of camera could focus in that mist, I wondered. Infrared? Ultraviolet? Laser?

Now Inspector Krom made a sweep of the river where the incident had taken place, then panned inland a bit. I guessed she was looking for Goldman’s transport. And there it was, all of a sudden, so perfectly incongruous that she had to return to it a couple of times: a sky-blue Rolls-Royce, with two men standing together, apparently taking advantage of a break in the weather. One of them was a liveried chauffeur, the other was bulky in a light cream Burberry done up to the neck and a tan fedora pulled over his eyes, long hair held back with a clip. There was no mistaking him. Even if the limousine and the chauffeur had not given him away, the Brahmin posture, and above all that famous ponytail, made it as certain as it was strange.

“Lord Sakagorn?” I muttered. “What the hell…”

“He’s Goldman’s legal counsel. Buddha knows why he would compromise himself like this.” Krom shook her head. She didn’t understand any more than I did.

The weather changed again and visibility dropped to near zero. The Inspector nodded at us. It was time for every cop to leave the scene. The Sergeant and I returned to our own van and Ruamsantiah drove us home. We were silent all the way. I know the Sergeant was plagued by the same thought as me: had some Black Death of the soul stowed away on the ship that brought us Facebook and Twitter?

T
he next morning I’m sitting at my desk in the station reading my usual online newspapers:
Thai Rath
and the
Bangkok Post.
Both carry photos of a hired boat smashed up on the riverbank. (Bear with me here, R: when memory excites I revert to the present tense, which is pretty much all we use in Thai. It’s always
now,
after all. FYI, I’m actually in a cell in the police station writing this narrative while my cigarettes are baking in the canteen’s oven: I’ll explain later.) Ferocious currents carried it downstream at a thirty-mile-an-hour clip before it crashed into a container vessel moored at the port at Klong Toey. Tragically, according to the report, the two women were thrown overboard into the raging torrent when the boat hit an unknown object in the water, while the two men hung on. The drowned female bodies were found a few miles downstream. The two men, it seemed, died in the collision with the ship.

Now Vikorn’s secretary, Manny, calls me: “He wants to see you.”

I climbed the stairs, knocked, entered, walked across the room to stand near his desk—and waited. The Old Man was standing at a window looking down on the cooked-food vendors on the street below. He might have been one of Asia’s richest kingpins and a feudal baron of the old kind, but he never forgot he was a son of the common people. The street vendors had been illegal for three decades, but the Colonel defended them against attack from every quarter of the bureaucracy, from Roads and Bridges to Public Health to traffic engineers and urban planners. By special arrangement he had his
khao kha moo
(stewed pork leg with rice) sent up on a signal from his window. The Isaan vendors would have gladly sent it without charge, or even with a modest bribe of thanks for his support over the years, but he would have none of it. He had Manny pay his
khao kha moo
bill regularly every week plus ten percent for the delivery.

I had spent more than fifteen years bound in medieval service to this man, he dominated my life and mind, and I was as sensitive to his moods as a timid wife; at least that’s the way it had been until now. Gossips said it was the onset of senility, the way he had seemed to diminish recently. I didn’t buy that. Tyrants like him go raging into the night; the only thing that brings them down is the tyranny of greater tyrants. For the first time in living memory someone or something bigger was winning, and he was losing—that was my analysis anyway.

There were three basic postures he adopted when staring out of this particular window: with cigar (mood climate here ranges from contented to gloating); with hands in pockets (contemplative, confidently waiting the next brilliant, criminal idea to enter his head); and frowning with hands on hips (not a good sign; trouble ahead). To these three mental states, common enough in our species, I must add another, for today he kept turning his face to the sky in the posture of a humble old man begging the gods for help. Here was criminal genius unmasked: ego stripped bare for the sake of survival, all self-love dumped unceremoniously as one might jettison a fur coat to avoid drowning. He knew I was standing near him but allowed a good five minutes to pass before he came back to earth to address me.

“I heard about what happened yesterday,” he said and paused. “If you speak of it to anyone, the Americans will take you out. On the other hand, the Chinese want you to continue with your investigation into the Market Murder—that Nong X case.”

This was the first official indication that there might be a connection between the Market Murder last week and the events on the river yesterday. In my mind I had tried to connect the unusual strength of the blond young man on the boat and the decapitation of Nong X, but there was no evidence to justify such a theory. After inspecting the crime scene, Sergeant Ruamsantiah had tried to take witness statements from the crowd around the roti vendor. Nobody knew anything. The best lead, if you could call it that, was a remark from the roti vendor to the effect that the house was managed by a middle-aged woman who sold watches in the market. That’s all he knew. Despite my detailing a team of ten constables to ask questions all over the market for the past three days, there were no other leads at all. I didn’t even have any information as to why the girl was in the apartment at that time. In a last desperate attempt to move the case forward I had the men put up lurid posters all over the market, asking for anyone with information to come forward. So far nobody had.

“Chinese, Chinese, Chinese,” I said. “It used to be everything American. Why, please tell me, would the Chinese give a damn about that sad little murder case I’m working on? And more important, why would
you
even think of
forming a sentence
that starts with the words
the Chinese want you to continue with your investigation
? Did the Chinese recently take over District 8?”

“You could say that.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

When Vikorn doesn’t want to answer a question, he stares at you, unblinking, like a lizard. “What do you care about the reason they’re interested? I thought you were moving heaven and earth to find the perp who murdered that girl in the market square? Didn’t you get a witness statement yet?”

“No. You distracted me with a mission that was totally top secret and therefore totally useless for my investigation. Did the Chinese order you to order me to the river yesterday? I’m just curious about who I’m working for these days.”

He shrugged. “You are famous. The Chinese hold you in high regard. If you cannot find convincing proof of a connection between the homicide you’re investigating and what happened on the river yesterday…”

“Yes?”

“Then I suppose that makes the American Asset worth the price.”

“Price? What price? There’s some kind of investment going on here?”

He grunted. “You have studied history. How did our great country save itself from foreign aggressors in the past?”

“By playing the British off against the French and the Americans off against the British, bending but never yielding. Selling off pieces of the country so the core could remain uncolonized.”

“Exactly.” He stared at me.
“That boy killed his own mother,”
the old gangster whispered and shook his head. “The Chinese were very impressed.” He creased his brow. “But they gave me a proverb:
Pride comes before a fall.
”

“That’s not Chinese, that’s
farang.
”

He nodded. “Yes, I think that’s what they meant: the proverb is about Americans.”

He took a couple of minutes more before he turned and strode to his desk. His ability to step back from despair took longer than usual but was nonetheless miraculous. When he was seated he said, “So, you finally met Inspector Krom?”

He knew very well I’d never heard of her before yesterday, but he wasn’t going to explain how or why a senior member of his force had been recruited and kept secret from the rest of us for…well, I had no idea how long Inspector Krom had been on our team, or where her office might be. I said, “Yes.”

“Good. That’s good. You’ll be working with her on this.”

“On what?”

“I’ll let her brief you later. Right now there’s something I want you to see.”

He stood up with a perfunctory smile and led me out of his room, past Manny who as usual was busy typing at her post, then down the corridor to the large room that was officially called the Main Conference Room, unofficially the Big Interview Room, and, more accurately, the Large Interrogation Chamber. It had been out of service for more than a month, so I was interested to see what kind of renovations Vikorn had ordered for it. As I followed him I noted a slight dragging of his left foot, a way of walking that was not yet a shuffle but perhaps heralded the onset of one. There was no pride or pleasure when he opened the door to the room. He opened it rather with an expression of defeat, like a husband who had reluctantly consented to his wife’s wholesale renovation of the home and now had to live with the consequence of his weakness.

When we entered, I found myself slack-jawed with astonishment: everything was Macintosh gray and tinted blue, and there was a huge LED screen at the end of the room, which he switched on, so that now we were looking at Google Maps. Vikorn, who has about ten words of English, experienced no difficulty in typing
Pacific Rim
on the laptop that controlled the screen. Now we had the entire ocean on the wall along with the lands that border it, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego on the right, from Siberia to the south of Indonesia on the left. Australia and New Zealand didn’t figure in this value system, but flags popped up in unlikely locations in Myanmar, Hong Kong, Jakarta, the Philippines, and northern California. Those all tended to be red and green points, however, with the reds in Asia and the greens in North America. The yellow flags were mostly in China, especially Yunnan and so-called second-tier cities in the southwest and along the east coast, while a few clustered on the outskirts of Shanghai. I scratched my jaw, determined not to ask the obvious question:
what the hell are you up to now?
Instead I went at the issue crab-wise.

“That’s, ah, an awful lot of exposure to China.”

He nodded. “Correct.”

I stared at the map some more, wondering what the deeper meaning might be. Vikorn always has deeper meanings. It was only when I realized the deeper meaning was really a form of confession that I began to develop a fuller understanding. “You have a partnership with them?”

“Joint venture.” He shrugged. “They didn’t leave me any choice: joint venture or massive bust, abduction up north, bullet in the skull.” He scratched his jaw. “They think like me. What I didn’t understand is that with them the real business is all mixed up with politics. It’s like a merger: you grow but you lose control at the same time.”

I nodded, taking it all in. The Earth still looks beautiful on a map. I knew, though, that if one were to zoom in on any town or city and switch to camera view, the gorgeous electronic colors would disappear and the screen would show dormitory towns, pollution, shopping malls, and traffic jams no matter which country you chose; our planet these days is best viewed from space. “All this high-tech stuff—who’s running it for you?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” He paused in quizzical mode, then added, “But I’m sure you’ve already guessed.”

He picked up his cell phone, pressed a button, said, “Send her in,” and closed the phone. He threw me a tolerant smile to show me how far behind his my thinking was. Now there was a knock on the door and a young woman entered.

“I know you’ve already met, but let me make the introduction anyway,” Vikorn said. “Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, this is Inspector Krom. Inspector Krom, this is Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep.” He turned to me. “Inspector Krom is our new head of technology,” he said.

If he had not spoken her name, I might not have recognized the drenched and hooded inspector in the black coveralls from the day before. Today she wore the regulation white blouse with blue shoulder boards and a navy skirt that reached below her knees. Vikorn normally treated all young women the same way: with impeccable chivalry based on the assumption that his power and charisma would be sufficient to bed her were he crass enough to use them, which he never did. After all, he owned clubs full of women younger, more voluptuous, and less challenging; but Krom stumped him. Part of the problem was that Vikorn was too old-fashioned—and the Inspector a tad too good-looking—for it even to occur to him that she was gay. I had radically to revise my view of the young woman who yesterday had seemed so fascinated by a hunk straight out of Hollywood. It seems I had misread her, for, in the Thai vernacular, it was plain to me that she was most definitely a
tom.
Of course, the requirements of survival in a man-dominated profession in Thailand demanded that she dissimulate: it was a little embarrassing the way she turned girly, to give the impression that the phallic force of Vikorn’s power and money were overwhelming her inner command center. (Are there any women who don’t know how to do that where you come from, R?)

It was a tired ritual, though, that neither party believed in. I think she would have liked to stand with legs apart, chest inflated, one hand in her pocket, the other brandishing a cigar. Trying to explain the technology while keeping up femininity and deference was quite a strain. Vikorn, on the other hand, looked like he needed to put his feet up in a comfortable chair at home.

“The red are pickup points and the green are delivery points.” She looked me carefully in the eye through those very cute black-framed spectacles that sat on the end of her tiny nose. Now she paused, waiting for me.

“And the yellow?” I obliged.

She checked with Vikorn, who nodded for her to answer my question. “They are…I don’t think there’s a word for it in Thai, and my English doesn’t stretch that far.” She checked with Vikorn again.

“Listening posts,”
he said with a groan.

“Right,” she said. “The Colonel is correct as always. Listening posts.”

“But they’re almost all in China?”

“Correct.” Now it was him and her against me. They both stared into my eyes for a moment, then looked away.

“May I ask why?”

“Because they are Chinese listening posts.”

“Listening to who?”

“Me,” Vikorn said, then added, “and the Americans. And all the other Asia Pac countries. But it’s okay.” He shrugged. “The Chinese are our friends.” He glanced at Krom and added, “Apparently.”

He and Krom were staring at me now, waiting. Why would they be waiting for something from me, the lowest-ranked of the three of us? I looked at Vikorn for an answer.

“Sonchai, what would
you
like to do?”

Does that sound like a normal, civilized question to you, R? Well, over here it’s not, it’s damned strange for someone like the Chief to ask me in social-worker tones what I would like to do. It’s never been my place to do what I like, my business is to do what
he
likes.