"Bangkok Tattoo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burdett John)

17

F arang, I humbly offer an apology. I had intended, on my return to Krung Thep, to reread Chanya's diary and share it with you (honestly), but duty-and ambition-compel me to postpone. Just now, while I was unpacking in my hovel by the river at about six this morning (the flight from the South was delayed, I didn't get in until after midnight), the cell phone rang. It was Vikorn's formidable female assistant, Police Lieutenant Manhatsirikit, known, not inappropriately, as Manny.

"The Colonel's not around and I can't get hold of him, so you'll have to sort this out on your own. It sounds like a nice little Trance 808 at the Sheraton on Sukhumvit. The general manager's scared shitless about the publicity, so you'd better get over there. Take someone with you."

"Why me?"

"I think it's X file."

"Zinna?"

"Must you be so indiscreet over the phone?"

I call Lek, whom I extract from the depths of sleep by dint of persistent ringing on his cell phone. He is all deference, though, as his mind clears and I tell him to be waiting outside his housing project so I can collect him in the cab.

At the Sheraton the general manager, an elegant but anxious Austrian (one of those European men who spend a good chunk of their time in this body trying to persuade a slick of hair to cover a bald patch-he was a woman last time around: vain, snobbish, and French; as is often the case when we switch genders between incarnations, he is having trouble adjusting: bald was never an issue last time; on the contrary he kept a magnificent head of hair all the way to his-actually her-deathbed), is waiting for us.

He ushers us into a lift, which takes us to the floor of suites near the top of the building. Outside room 2506 he produces a key to let us in. "Room service found him early this morning when they went in to collect a food trolley from last night. No one responded to their knocks, so they assumed the suite was empty. No one's been inside since."

In the room Lek takes one look at the corpse, then falls to his knees to wai the Buddha and pray that we will not be contaminated by death or bad luck, while the manager looks on in amazement. I tell the manager to wait outside.

The Japanese, dressed in smart casual, is slumped sideways on the sofa with that telltale professional hole in his forehead. I note that rigor mortis has set in but have forgotten exactly what that means in terms of the time of death. Lek, fresh from the academy, can't remember, either. I undo the buttons on the shirt to check if there are any other wounds, in the certainty that there will be none.

"Not a mark on him," I confirm, mostly to myself. There won't be any other clues, either, of course, so why waste time looking for them? I call the manager back in.

"It's a very professional hit. One small-bore slug between the eyes. How long has he been staying here?"

"He wasn't staying here. He must have been invited by the guest, who has disappeared, of course. Why the hell they had to choose this hotel I can't imagine."

My cell phone rings. It's Vikorn. "What are you up to?"

"I'm on a T808 at the-"

"I know where you are. Get out of there."

"But Manny said it's X file. Zinna."

"That's why I want you out of there. This is needle, pure provocation, I'm not taking the bait. Let the fucking army deal with it. I don't want any record that you were there at all. I'll needle him back with silence, while I think up something better." Despite the restraint in his strategy, he is boiling with rage.

"Oh." Somewhat crestfallen, I take another look at the corpse. "This is the General's calling card?"

"He's just letting us know he's back on form, after that court-martial."

Out of the corner of my eye I watch Lek posturing in front of the long mirror opposite the sofa. He can stand on one leg and pull the string of an imaginary bow with extraordinary elegance. I'm wishing I hadn't allowed the manager back in.

"So who's the stiff?"

A grunt from Vikorn. "The victim is a muckraking journalist based here and employed by some Japanese environmentalist group with an ax to grind about Japanese destruction of forest lands in Asia. He was investigating a Thai-Japanese corporation that intimidates peasants off their lands in Isaan so they can plant eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus soak up the whole of the water table and destroy all other forms of vegetation, making the land useless for generations, but they grow fast and keep the Nips supplied with disposable chopsticks. Why the fuck they can't use plastic chopsticks, I just don't know. If the Chinese used disposable wood, there wouldn't be a tree left on the planet."

"So what's in it for Zinna?"

"The dear General owns a thirty-five percent stake in the Thai-Nippon Reforestation and Beautification of Isaan Corporation. His men do the intimidating."

"He's never done this on your patch before."

"The little prick's showing off, making a point, breaking all the rules. He got off that court-martial, and now he's rubbing my nose in it." The Colonel can hardly speak for indignation.

"You're going to let him get away with it?"

"I'm hardly going to knock heads with Zinna for one little T808, am I? Because that's exactly what he wants me to do." A pause dominated by his dragon breathing. "There's always more than one way of skinning a snake."

"What shall I tell the general manager?"

"That there won't be publicity. That's all he needs to know."

I close the phone and lock with the manager's anxious eyes. "It's taken care of," I say. He checks my expression to see if I mean what he wants me to mean, then grunts with relief. "What about the corpse?"

"Army specialists will take it away later today."

"Army specialists? Why would they deal with this?"

"Because we won't, and they can't just leave it here. Someone will call them. Don't worry about it-it's one of those funny little Thai things."

"How much do I owe you?"

"I don't take money. Save it for the army."

"Look," Lek says as we are about to leave. I'd left the corpse's shirt undone. Lek is pulling it open again. "Isn't that the most beautiful butterfly you've ever seen? I mean, it's just gorgeous."

I pause to study the tattoo, which in my haste I had disregarded. It's true, the workmanship is magnificent, the colors both subtle and vivid. Come to think of it, it's a minor masterpiece.

"I've never seen one as good as that before," Lek says.

In the cab on the way to the station, stuck in a brooding jam at the intersection between Petburri Road and Soi 39 (on the other side of the glass: carbon monoxide laced with air), Lek says: "Did you know that according to Buddhism there were three human beings at the beginning of the world?"

"Yes."

"A man, a woman, and a katoey?"

"That's right."

"And we've all been all three, over and over again, going back tens of thousands of years?"

"Correct."

"But the katoey is always the loner."

"Katoey is a tough part of the cycle," I say as gently as I can.

"What's a Trance 808?"

"The murder, love. It comes from the number of the standard homicide documentation: T808. Vikorn called it Trance 808 once, and it caught on."

Back at the station Manny (she's five feet tall-just-and so dark she's almost black, with the intensity of a scorpion) commands me in her most severe tone to go see Vikorn. "Don't take him with you," she adds, not rising from her desk, jerking her chin at Lek. In a meaningful glance at me, she adds: "The old man's been looking at the Ravi pictures."

I turn pale but say nothing.

Upstairs, I'm standing all alone on the bare wooden boards outside his office. In response to my knock, a bark: "What?"

"It's me."

"Get the fuck in here."

I enter gingerly, in case he's waving his pistol around, a common adjunct to Vikornic rage. Well, actually he has taken it out, it's lying on his desk, but the signals are even worse. In a single timeless locking of eyes, I see that he's been playing those old memory tapes again; wallowing. There's a near-empty bottle of Mekong rice whiskey next to the gun, and an album of photographs in a large plastic cube showing his son Ravi at key moments in his short life. Ravi's corpse dominates the montage.

For everyone in District 8, the story is fundamental to our mythology. None of us were there at the time, but each of us has lived every moment. A few snaps from the photo album will be enough for your astute understanding, farang:

Snapshot 1: Ravi at age zero. Vikorn, husband to four wives, father to eight girls, holds his only son as if he were holding the meaning of life.

Snapshot 2: Ravi aged five, playing kiddie golf in a lush garden with the lovestruck Colonel.

Snapshot 3: Ravi at age sixteen bearing the symptoms of a seriously spoiled brat (smirk; gold Rolex; Yamaha V MAX motorbike; a beautiful girlfriend he was in the process of destroying with cocaine, sex, and alcohol; the old man making up the threesome with an obscene beam).

Snapshot 4: Ravi in his early twenties in Gucci casual standing in front of his scarlet Ferrari in Vikorn's country estate up in Chiang Mai.

Snapshot 5: Ravi dead from a wound in his chest, his shirt soaked in pink blood fresh from the lungs.

The riots of May 1992 took everyone by surprise. It was supposed to be just another army coup (we've had thirteen since our first constitution in 1932, nine of them successful), but something had changed in the common people. General Suchinda, our prime minister of the month, was totally wrong-footed: the downtrodden were actually marching for democracy. A few bullets should do the trick. The order was given from on high. Zinna, no more than a colonel at the time, was one of those officers who believe in leading by example. (Perhaps he doubted his men would fire on their own people?) He raised his own gun, a large pistol, and fired just as he gave the order for his men to do likewise. Fifty died in the un-Buddhist bloodbath. Outrage and democracy swiftly followed (it was that or civil war), but Ravi, it seems, had never intended to join the march; he had simply been forced to abandon his Ferrari because the demonstrators were blocking the street and he got caught up in their rage. (The autopsy revealed white powder all but blocking Ravi's nasal passages; he had died with a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in his left hand, and the alcohol level in his blood was high.)

No mention is made of Ravi in the final report of the commission of inquiry into the riots, but every Thai understood what had gone on in Zinna's mind when he selected his one and only target. Ravi, you see, looked like a rich man's child, even from a distance. Perhaps Zinna didn't know who he was, but he understood very well what he was, and by all the rules of feudalism he should have held his fire. But Zinna, an upwardly mobile soldier-gangster of humble origins with chips on both shoulders, saw no reason for special treatment and fired deliberately at the arrogant, spoiled, drunk, drugged product of the system he served. Or did Zinna indeed recognize the son of his greatest rival? This is Vikorn's firm belief, for Zinna had purchased his commission with the fruits of his own substantial trafficking. Only Zinna knows what was in his mind when he pulled the trigger, but certain it is that with one fatal shot, he started a feud to last a lifetime. An unexpected consequence has been Vikorn's passionate conversion to democracy. He saw that the people were the only stick big enough with which to beat the army.

There have been many skirmishes in this war, for Zinna is no mean adversary. Deciding eventually, like all great narrators, that truth is best expressed through fiction, Vikorn one day last year had a truck dump a pile of morphine bricks onto Zinna's land in his country hideout up in Chiang Mai, then tipped off the local police chief. The scandal almost sank the General, but with his usual resilience he mounted a spirited defense at his court-martial, during which he supplied video shots taken from a security camera. The film showed a truck inexplicably arriving across a field, then two young men wearing black lace-up boots unhooking the back and pulling the gray brick-sized contents onto the land. Close-ups indicated the boots were not army but police issue.

The minute he saw that Zinna would survive his trial, Vikorn began another tack. Rather than micromanage Zinna's downfall himself, he has instead guaranteed promotion and a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any cop in District 8 who finally nails the General. In addition, he has placed a trusted subordinate in charge of the file (if you can call it that, for nothing is ever written down in this inquiry), with the standing instruction to work on it whenever there's nothing more pressing in the in-box. Vikorn's choice of subordinate in this case was shrewd in the extreme: how did he guess that buried among my most secret defilements was a passion for promotion?

"He dropped the mark on my patch." Vikorn glares at me.

"Not the best party manners."

"Don't give me your fucking supercilious farang back-chat."

"Sorry."

"D'you realize what this means?"

"Maybe I'm missing the finer points."

"Maybe you're missing the main fucking point. Would you come to my house and drop an elephant turd on my Persian rug?"

"Your what?"

"That's the level of insult. It doesn't get worse than this. No one, I mean no one, not even your army fuckups, does this. It's the main rule. Without it we'd have-we'd have-"

"Anarchy?"

He looks at me but does not see me. In this case blind rage is no metaphor. He stops abruptly, goes to his desk, and picks up the gun to examine it curiously, as if unsure of the crimes it is about to commit, then with great care lays it down again next to the photos. I breathe a sigh of relief, for I have seen this before: the white heat of his fury slowly but surely mastered by a Herculean determination to use his great intellect for the purpose of spite. He looks at me again, eyes still glazed somewhat, but brighter. "Yes, anarchy. Do farang really suppose that our society could survive one minute without rules? Just because we don't follow the written ones doesn't make us third-world bums. No jao por wastes a mark on another jao por's patch. It just doesn't happen. This could take us back to the stone age."

"I understand."

"Good. You understand. Well, that's all that fucking matters, isn't it? In the whole fucking universe, what really makes the stars shine and the planets orbit is whether Sonchai Jitpleecheep understands or not."

"I didn't-"

"Didn't what? You're in charge of the X file-you were supposed to protect me from this."

"Huh? You never said anything about protecting you from Zinna's provocation. You said keep an eye out for opportunity-"

A scream: "Don't you see I've got to respond? And it has to be even worse than what he did to me?"

I refrain from saying: That's not a very Buddhist point of view.

Heaving, but resuming self-control. "Give me a report. How many major drug busts since Zinna got off?"

"Only two. They were both attempted exports to Europe."

"And?"

"The first was a minor player, a mule. She's pleading guilty. There's no obvious connection to Zinna-it was heroin, not morphine."

"And the other?"

He looks at me, causing a great quaking in my guts. "Sorry, I forgot to follow up."

"You what?"

"I was distracted. They brought him in a few days ago, looks like a heavy hitter, but we got focused on the farang Chanya wasted, and then I made that trip down south."

Glaring: "We still have the junk?"

"It's with the forensic boys."

"Morphine or heroin?"

"Looks like morphine."

Screaming: "Do what you need to do. I want to know where that morphine came from. I know he took my dope back from the army after the court-martial."

Exiting with a high wai: "Yes, sir."

I'm out in the corridor making running repairs to my psyche after the Vikornic onslaught. Look at it this way: for the Colonel to guess what Zinna will do next, he merely has to consult his own psychology. If Zinna dumped a hundred kilos of morphine on Vikorn's land, what would Vikorn have done? Do I hear: Sold the dope, of course? In the event (not, when all was told, unlikely) that Zinna found a way of wriggling out of the frame-up, would the General miss an opportunity of making twenty million dollars or so out of the product that his arch-enemy so generously supplied free, gratis, and for nothing? Do wounded bulls charge red rags?

Back at my desk, my first call is to Sergeant Ruamsantiah.

"That farang with the morphine last week. What was his name?"

"Buckle. Charles, but he calls himself Chaz."

"The Colonel is taking an active interest in the case."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because it's morphine. How many times do we see morphine these days?"

"Hardly at all. It gets synthesized into heroin before it leaves the Golden Triangle."

"Exactly."

A moment of silence, then: "Wow! Vikorn, that cunning old bastard! He knew Zinna might get off the inquiry, persuade his army chums to sell him back the confiscated dope, and export it, right? So now Zinna has to get rid of more than a hundred kilos of morphine in a hurry before someone blows the whistle on him. All the heroin labs are inconveniently located up north, so he's not going to have time to synthesize."

I say nothing.

"So anyone caught with morphine at this moment has a better-than-even chance of being a courier for Zinna?"

"Correct."

"Amazing. I never would have thought of that." A pause. "It's like they say: with the Colonel it's the B plans you have to watch for."

"You got that right."

All enthusiasm now, with little bubbles of ebullience punctuating his speach: "I'll go check on Buckle myself-he's downstairs in the cells. I'll call you back in five."

"Great."

While we're waiting for the good sergeant, farang, let me revisit the Buckle bust with you. It happened about a day before Chanya killed Mitch Turner.