The Bangkok Asset: A novel (9 page)

“And the phone is set up for English only?”

“Correct.”

Silence. “Sonchai, I don’t know anything about this.”

“Right.”

“You’re on your own here—it doesn’t fit with anything I’m working on.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you being sarcastic? You don’t believe me?”

“You could at least speculate, given all that classified knowledge you’re going to share with me sooner or later, once I’ve been properly vetted—right?”

Silence, then, “You’re smart, aren’t you? Just like they said you were. But maybe not that smart. I tell you all I can, probably more than I should. Could it be that I’m protecting you as well as myself? Do you think I’m not limited by
need to know,
just like everyone else?”

I groaned. “Just give me a hint, would you?”

“Those old Americans. They could be key, but I’m not sure. If they have connections to anywhere in Cambodia, follow up—but let me know first. That’s all I can say.” She closed the phone.

I walked around the crime scene to rejoin young Detective Tassatorn and the Sergeant. There was no point in trying to examine any more of the debris, which included a great mass of papers and photos that were soggy from the water used to douse the embers and would probably fall apart if I tried to separate them from each other. Anyway, my line of inquiry had now shifted to the victims. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me directly to the government hospital where the three Americans were laid up.

They were in a secure ward: standard procedure in case of injury by explosions. You can have yourself shot by five fully automatic combat rifles and still not qualify for the secure ward; just one little homemade bomb, though, and you get the full treatment: metal detectors at the door, grim and very bored security, medical staff not happy that in addition to risking death by disease every day of their working lives they have to risk being blown up by bomb-toting terrorists and—perhaps worse—follow strict government security guidelines.

The first two beds on the ward were occupied by two Buddhist teachers who had been sent to the Islamic south to teach in government schools and within weeks became victims of the troubles down there. The Islamic resistance doesn’t like to see its territory seduced by Buddhist do-gooders, so a teaching assignment in Yala, Pattani, or any of the Islamic provinces is a dangerous posting that can amount to a death sentence. I was depressed to see their heads and eyes bandaged and remembered my uncle’s phrase,
connoisseurs of bitterness,
but strode onward to the other end of the ward where the Americans lay on their backs.

Question: how do you tell one American from another when they are all over sixty and have their heads, eyes, and half their faces covered in bandages? A male nurse came to find me while I was staring at them. In Thai script, the legend on the clipboards at the end of the bed was strange. It referred to each patient by his hospital registration number, then gave one of three possible names in English:
William J. Schwartz; Laurence Krank; Harry Berg.
In other words, nobody knew who was who. They were all in comas of various degrees of depth.

“It’s not unusual, especially with the old, for people to remain in a coma after traumatic shock for days, even weeks, then recover totally,” the nurse explained. “These two,” he added, pointing, “have no damage to the skull at all, only the skin. They will recover soon. This one, though,” he said, pointing at the last bed, “we’re not sure. He was blown back by the blast and hit his head on something hard. There’s quite a lot of swelling. If it gets worse we might have to break open the skull to release the pressure.” Now he came to the punch line and I understood why he was being so helpful. “That’s a long, expensive operation, because after we release the pressure we have to use plates to screw the pieces of skull back together again.”

I stared at the implacable mummies lying on the bed. A sentimental fantasy crossed my mind as I looked at them.
No
—I half smiled at myself—
coincidences like that don’t happen in real life.
On the other hand, a cynical but inevitable thought slipped past the internal defenders of the soul:
If one of them is
him,
I sure hope it’s not the one with the brain damage.
Then a third thought came flying out of left field:
Could that be why the anonymous gray men pulling all our strings are interested in me? Because of him? But why? And if so, which him? And who, actually, is calling the shots?

“What shall I say to the Registrar?” the nurse was asking. “There are funds for the operation or not?”

I stared at the old man in the bed and allowed that thought to resurface:
Supposing, just supposing…After all, one of those guys had taken more than a hundred shots of me on Soi Cowboy, hadn’t they? Or had they?
Now was the time to test Vikorn, force him to reveal his hand just a tad.

I fished out my cell phone to call him. I told him of a patient/victim who might need extensive brain surgery and suggested he might like to help out with the expenses. That he even hesitated told me that he somehow knew more about the bomb at Klong Toey than anyone else I’d talked to that day. He said, “Okay, I’ll have Manny deal with it.”

“What about the other two—they’re not thought to be in serious danger, but I guess you’d want to keep them all together?”

A normal reaction would have been for him to say,
No, what the hell for?

“Sure,” he said, “have all three moved to the international hospital at Hua Lamphong. They do a lot of brain stuff there.”

“Yes,” I told the nurse, “there are funds—but are you equipped for such an operation? Should we think of moving him somewhere else?”

The nurse smiled with relief. “Oh, yes, that is good news. One of the big international hospitals will have all the machines and the expertise. We don’t have any specialist brain surgeons here.”

I decided to try to clear up one part of the puzzle. “How did you know their names?” I asked.

“They arrived with a money belt containing three passports. We’re waiting for the Cambodian embassy to provide more identification, so we can tell who is who.”

“Cambodian? But they’re all Americans.”

“Yes, that’s what the passports say: Americans with Cambodian citizenship. I’ll show you the photocopies the registration staff took of the passports.”

I followed him out of the ward and down to the registration area. He entered an office and quickly returned with three bundles of photocopies.

Khmer script looks quite a lot like Thai, unless you’re Thai, when it appears as a collection of tantalizing squiggles and curls—pretty much the way Thai would appear to you, R. Fortunately, the Khmer was translated into English for purposes of international travel. The owners were Americans who had been naturalized as Cambodian citizens. The photographs were taken a long time ago, however, and were useless for identification. The only stamps were Thai visas. It seemed the owners had entered Thailand about ten months before and obtained retirement visas good for a year. They had entered our country together at the same time on the same day.

I thanked the nurse and promised that a team from the hospital in Chinatown would send an ambulance once the paperwork had been sorted out.

From the hospital I decided to use a motorbike taxi to avoid the jam on Rama IV. Like the bike jockeys on Soi Cowboy, my man was a hardbody with a neck like a buffalo who loved taking chances. You become very conscious of your knees when your pilot starts into the close-vehicle work, winding between stationary or slowly moving vans, cars, and trucks. He knew what he was doing and expected me to take care of my own legs. Then my phone rang. I saw the call was from Krom.

“Where are you?”

“On the back of a bike dying from asphyxiation.”

“You went to the hospital? Did you find out anything?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t do this. Tell me what you discovered.”

“The three American victims own Cambodian passports.”

It seemed I had finally impressed her. “Interesting life choice,” she said.

On reflection, that was my reaction too. I don’t want to cause offense, R, but let’s face it, there has been a steady exodus from spiritual desolation in the Occident for some time now.
Farang
these days find wives or husbands in many Asian nations, including Thailand, Malaysia—and of course China. Cambodia, though? If they weren’t so old, one would assume they were CIA spies as a matter of course.

“I’ll tell you more tomorrow when you come by,” I said and closed the phone.

W
e started our morning with a row, Chanya and I. She wanted to know exactly why Krom was coming to visit, and if it was a business call, then why did she, Chanya, need to be there at all? She meant she didn’t need a social or professional event in which she was merely ornamental. She had a PhD, for Buddha’s sake, a Facebook following of nearly a thousand, she had written learned articles for online academic journals—and none of it seemed to impinge on reality at all, as if it all happened on a Google cloud somewhere. She was honest enough to admit that hers was a strange, possibly certifiable form of paranoia—but quite common these days. What she most resented was finding herself in the role of insecure little wife who had to be included in a serious adult meeting so that she wouldn’t feel like—well, an insecure little wife.

She was still in one of her rages while she showered out in the yard under a hosepipe, skillfully deploying a towel so no prying eyes could see her private parts, then returned dripping to the hovel, feeling better. She gave me a sheepish smile, laid a hand on my forearm. “Sorry.” She smiled.

“It’s okay. I understand.”

“No you don’t. You have a job. That makes you real. I don’t, that makes me a ghost. Let’s leave it at that.”

I guessed that was as good as it was going to get, so I shrugged, smiled, hugged her, and we were about as patched up as we were going to be that merry morning. I guessed she would not let the meeting pass without asserting herself in some way in accordance with online advice from her groups.

We were both showered, soaped, perfumed, and ready for Krom in about ten minutes. I felt tense and excited at the same time. As a cop I knew better than to hope for a sudden big break in the Market Murder case; as a man I hoped for a sudden big break in the case that had my name on it in blood.

Chanya could not resist an irrelevant question. “I wonder what Inspector Krom will be wearing? I mean, she can’t come in uniform since it’s all so hush-hush. What does a dyke like her put on for breakfast meetings?”

Now that I thought of it, that was a fascinating piece of trivia. What would Krom be wearing?

“It depends if she comes by taxi or on the back of a bike,” Chanya said.

“Why?”

“If she dresses up, she won’t want to be windblown. Depends how much she needs to impress you.” She coughed. “I mean, for her enterprises, of course, whatever they are.” Then she added, “She may be a dyke, but she’s still a woman, you know.”

It was a taxi. The young woman who emerged with a close-cropped haircut and dark glasses wore a fresh-pressed black shirt with cream bootlace tie, a cutaway jacket in black-and-white butcher’s stripes, pants with knife-sharp creases and the same wide vertical stripes as the jacket, brogues only slightly feminized with square toes, also two-tone. When I opened the door I was much refreshed by a strong cologne: Fabergé Brut for Men, if I was not mistaken. She carried a slim black briefcase.

“Do come in,” I said with a smile. Once in, she made a point of
waiing
Chanya. Chanya
waied
back. She had to acknowledge how impeccably Krom was behaving, giving the woman of the house
big face,
as the Chinese say.

There were no chairs or sofas to sit on, but I guessed Krom was brought up without furniture, like Chanya and me; she had no trouble hitching up her pants, bending her knees, and sitting on a cushion with her back against a wall like a well-dressed gangster. She took a single sheet of paper out of the briefcase. It looked like a printout from the Net.

“MKUltra,” she said.

Krom passed the single sheet over to us.

“I just copied the headline. I think that seeing it in black and white on a public document kind of helps with the credibility.”

It was a short extract from an article in Wikipedia. We looked at it, then looked up, blinking. Krom read from the extract and we followed, word by word:

Project MKUltra was the code name of a U.S. government human research operation experimenting in the
behavioral
engineering of humans through the CIA’s Scientific Intelligence Division. The program began in the early 1950s and officially halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

Chanya and I stared at her with wrinkled brows.

“Ultra was a huge scandal in the seventies, but it went with all the other huge scandals,” Krom explained. “The world assumed it was a purely American story all about the toxic mix of ruthless spies and worse scientists. There was a movie:
The Manchurian Candidate.
Naturally, in the film the bad guys manipulating poor innocent Americans are driven by wicked Orientals desperate to take over the world using mind control.” Krom looked me in the eye. “I think you know Goldman ran the project in Vietnam as a young—very young—CIA agent. Of course, in Vietnam everyone who was put in harm’s way was young, most of the soldiers were under twenty-two. Goldman was twenty-six when he first went out. I guess the CIA also had its Rear Echelon Motherfuckers who didn’t want to risk their careers and left the wet stuff to ambitious young men like Joseph Goldman.”

I was in shock and had to reread the printout a couple more times. That’s the power of print for you. I know the lawyer Sakagorn had hinted at something like this, but to see it referred to in the public space, to be told it had a notorious history that included congressional hearings—that was different. Krom seemed to understand that she had initiated me into a higher level of knowledge—and that was the purpose of the meeting.

When I looked up, the dynamics had changed. I took a clue from the strange look on Chanya’s face and switched to Krom, who was staring at her. I had to blink. So far I had seen two sides of the Inspector: the consummate professional cop and the wild humping dyke with full-body tattoo. Now I had to add: seasoned connoisseur of the female form. Chanya was still a very attractive woman (another hurdle to overcome in her quest for respect:
I don’t want to be cute anymore,
she would complain while applying moisturizers and embarking on radical diets), and Krom seemed to be concentrating on just how carefully, slowly, and adoringly she would like to undress her. Now I understood the way she was all dressed up and drowned in cologne: did she expect Chanya to fall for her on the spot?

Chanya saw what I had seen and moved a few inches nearer to me. This didn’t faze Krom at all. Like a male of the most politically incorrect kind, she appeared confident that she could take what she wanted when she wanted it. Her eyes shone when she looked at me, as if her victory and my defeat were certain. As if she belonged to a superior race. This enraged me, but Chanya’s reaction was more complex. Like me she was affronted by Krom’s arrogance; on the other hand, in her event-starved life perhaps a little adventure with a crazy
tom
would help pass the time?

I coughed. The moment passed. Krom tore her eyes away from my wife to look at me. “Here’s the kicker. After the big Frank Olson scandal, when MKUltra had to go underground, Goldman recruited a young British psychiatrist who had researched psychedelic drugs at Cambridge. How or why he was in Southeast Asia at that time is not known. Some say he was Goldman’s original mentor, the brains that made it all happen. For sure, the experiment wasn’t going anywhere until this shrink showed up.”

“This British shrink made the Asset happen?”

“That’s the implication. But the psychiatrist is extremely reclusive. This is all we have, an alleged photograph about fifty years old, and a name you can’t forget.” She dipped into her briefcase and brought out a sheet with a photograph printed on it.

The photograph seemed to have been taken in a Southeast Asian city, probably Saigon, for there were rickshaws and women in cone-shaped straw hats in the background. It was also long ago; the cars were all models from the sixties. The young man in the picture was unusually tall and skinny, and towered over the brown people around him. He was as improbable as a Greek god who arrived by mistake in the twentieth century in the middle of a war. Long blond hair lay over his shoulders and cascaded down the blinding psychedelic silk shirt. His face was both naïve and triumphant, as if he had found the God particle. He had chemically scaled the heights, solved the problem of existence, and now oozed benevolence, enlightenment, and confidence. He certainly didn’t look like an academic, but then those were very different times.

I looked up from the photo. “And his name?”

“Bride,” Krom said. “Dr. Christmas Bride.”

She stood up quite suddenly, picked up her briefcase, and made her way to the door. She
waied
us, told me not to come out to the street to help her find a taxi, and was gone. Chanya and I stared at each other. I wanted to know what Chanya thought, so I didn’t say anything.

“That is one very disciplined lady,” she said.

“Yes. I think so too. In what way, though?”

“She came to deliver a message. The message was that name:
Dr. Christmas Bride.
Of course, I don’t know anything about the case. Why is that name so important it’s worth a special private visit like this? Why couldn’t she give it to you over the phone or at work?”

“Because she wants to have you.”

“But how would she know that when she’s never met me before?”

“Think male,” I said. “Among pack animals tumescence is a product of hormones, fantasy, and competition, the lust object itself comes last. Most of the men in the station drool over you, even the ones you’ve never met—a reputation like yours makes for restless dreams.”

When I arrived at work, Manny, Vikorn’s secretary, told me that Krom and I had a meeting scheduled with the Old Man later in the day. “It’s important,” she added ominously.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. He received a phone call just now and he turned serious.”

“Where did the call come from?”

“I think Beijing.”