The Bangkok Asset: A novel (24 page)

N
ext day I’m at the cooked-food stall opposite the station, my gun jammed down the back of my pants, eating
khao kha moo
and continuing to absorb my meeting with Roberto da Silva, who looms in my memory like a crippled hero from a time of giants. Then my phone vibrates and I pull it out of my pants pocket. The message from Chanya is simple enough:
HE’S HERE. FOR BUDDHA’S SAKE HELP.

For a long moment I blink at the phone, unable to take it in. Now I realize who
he
is and I’m trying to get
her
on the phone. No answer. I’m sweating, I can feel my face twitching with fear and rage. I put money on the table for the food, stand in the street to stop a cab that already has a passenger, a
farang.
I flash my police ID: “Emergency.” The
farang
gets out grudgingly at first, then speeds up when he sees my face. He starts to say, “I’m not paying—”

I cut him off, push him out of the way, tell the cab driver to ignore the rules, just get me there. I sit beside him, frantically trying to get someone on the phone, anyone who knows her: my mother,
her
mother, her closest friends. Finally, I have the brilliant idea of calling our next-door neighbor.

“Someone came about half an hour ago, I happened to be looking out the window.”

“Man or woman?”

“Man.”

“So what did he look like?”

“No need to shout. He was tall, young, a
farang.
” A snicker. “Very good-looking, blond, a real pinup.”

“Is he still there?”

“I don’t know. I only looked out for a moment. I’m not a nosey person.” She adds, “Don’t worry, she’s a good girl, you know, very kind and devout, I’m sure—”

I cut her off.

At the hovel I throw some twenty-baht bills at the cab driver, run to the front door, knock, ring, and fumble with my keys at the same time. It doesn’t help that someone has closed the drapes so I cannot see inside. When I enter it’s quite dark. I switch on the lights. A flood of relief: Chanya is there, sitting on her chair by her computer. A flood of terror: she isn’t moving. A flood of relief: I can see she is breathing. There is something strange about her, though. She is rigid. When I touch her I feel a vibration. She is shivering in a way I’ve never seen before: a constant shaking of her whole body, but high-frequency shortwaves as if she is plugged into some machine. I turn her face to look at her. Her eyes are open windows to the terror within. I tap her gently on the shoulder, grab a bottle of red wine I’ve been meaning to drink one happy evening when this damned case is over, open it, pour her a mugful. She opens her mouth, allows me to pour some in. When it starts to drip down her chin she snaps out of her coma, swallows, reaches for the mug, downs it. I pour some more.

“He was here,” she gasps. “That thing of yours. He came.”

“What did he do?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. Sonchai, that’s what is so incredibly scary. He didn’t need to do anything. He just stood there. Oh, Buddha, I’ve never known anything like it. This big, slim, gorgeous man with the most beautiful hands and Hollywood good looks simply stood there and scared the living shit out of me. He’s not human. Whatever it is he gives off, it’s not human. You can’t be around him. I saw that at the fight, but I was too far away to understand. I thought he was just some super soldier the CIA had created—I had no idea what it really meant, that something like that could actually exist.
His eyes.
” She gulps some more wine.

“He didn’t say anything?”

She shakes her head. “Oh, yes, he did.”

“What?”

She stares at me and starts to shake again. I try to hold her, but she pushes me away. She is not shaking with terror, but with a kind of high, disbelieving laughter. “He said, ‘Happy birthday to you.’ For tomorrow.” She shakes her head at me as if to say,
Can you believe this?
“You forgot, so did I.
He
remembered.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“That you had to meet him for your birthday lunch. You must not tell anyone else. And you must not bring a weapon. If you told anyone or brought a weapon, he would know. But otherwise you would be perfectly safe. He did not want to hurt a hair on your head.”

“That’s all?”

“Then he said, ‘Tell my brother I’m sorry if I’ve been rude.’ ” She looks at me. “That was the weirdest of all. Like he just appears from nowhere, scares me to death, then worries that he might have offended
you.
Like he’s broken some minor social rule, when he’s, you know, the living walking image of something totally alien that doesn’t belong, like something that just got off a spaceship—and he says it again, in a polite tone, quite apologetic as if he was really concerned: ‘Tell my brother I’m sorry if I’ve been rude.’ But at the same time the psychic gouging was deliberate, he started to feed off my terror and had to control himself. I could feel him doing things to my guts, just by staring, boring straight into my womb. He knew what he was doing. He kind of paralyzed me with perverted lust that twisted my guts. He had to literally snap out of it, or he would have had his fun with me. I would have been like that poor girl whose murder you’re investigating, body parts all over the house.” She poured herself some more wine. “That’s beyond screwed up, Sonchai, that’s way beyond psycho. And I could tell, he has perfect mental organization—I bet he would come out sane and well-balanced in any test. Probably a model citizen.”

“A model citizen,”
I repeat, grabbing the bottle and swallowing some wine before she drinks it all. We stare at each other.

“I forgot,” Chanya says, drunk now. “He left you this.”

She takes a packet from the table. “I wondered if it was a bomb and if I should leave it outside. But he’s not like that. He’s much more intimate than that. He fucks you with his mind before he tears your head off.” She hands it to me. It can only be a book, a paperback, wrapped in satin with red, white, and blue stripes. I pull off the wrappings and show the book to Chanya:
The Gospel of Judas.
I heft the gift for a moment while Chanya watches. When I open it the inscription reads:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

To my dear brother, long lost, found now.

I show Chanya the message and open the book. The central argument of
The Gospel of Judas
is that it was Judas Iscariot, not John, whom the Christ loved most. Judas, the only disciple with any worldly sense, is set up by Jesus as the fall guy for the most brilliant piece of theater of all time called the Crucifixion. In other words, it turns Christianity on its head.

Now my phone bleeps:

Birthday lunch tomorrow, Dear One? Do you know Nandino’s? It’s on the river. They have a private room. I’ll book. Twelve forty-five for one o’clock? Smart casual.

“You won’t go, will you?” Chanya asks. “He could just kill you on a whim, rip your head off like—”

“Of course I’m going,” I say, staring at the book and the neat handwriting. “How can I not?”

“Because you’re a cop?”

“No. Because I’m a lost soul.”

“P
lease, do have some
grissini,
” the Asset says. “Freshly baked this morning. I told them I want the highest standards, no shortcuts, for I have a very special guest.” I take one of the breadsticks Superman is offering me. We both crunch for a moment. “Hmm, they baked them with rosemary. Excellent, don’t you think?”

“Ah, yes, very good,” I say truthfully, “very, very good.”

As an expression of his good manners he has seated me in a chair facing the panoramic window. I have a perfect view of the Chao Phraya River behind him: rice barges, tourist yachts, long-tail water buses, sampans, rowboats. It’s busy.

“Do you love Italian food as much as do I?” he asks in that silky, well-washed voice.

“Actually, yes, I do enjoy it more than any other
farang
cuisine.”

“Let’s face it, everything worth having in Europe originates in Italy. Especially the food. French is basically Italian with a truckload of butter and cream thrown at it. Of course, the word
Italian
covers a thousand dishes. I don’t mind the poverty cuisines of Sicily and the south, but it doesn’t have the finesse or variety of the north. No, it’s got to be Tuscan or Piemonte.” I blink at him for a moment and continue munching. His blue eyes shine. “Shall I tell you what you are thinking? You are thinking my, my, what breadth of education and culture they gave him, this Asset. Am I right?” I cough. “But let us return to the small talk. Italian, yes, basically, the whole of modern Western culture originates in my hometown.” He smiles and crunches on another
grissini.

“Your hometown?”

He shrugs. “One of them. I can’t say I’m exactly proud, but there you are.” A pause. “We’ll come to that shortly.”

I shake my head. The frightening thing is that he is not crazy. It is just as Chanya observed: a perfectly organized brain of the highest intelligence. Now the waiter brings a full bread basket with seven-cereal rolls and a tapenade of anchovies. Every Thai loves anchovies; they taste like the sauces we make from rotten fish.

“Could you tell me—I mean, I’m very flattered—but, why, exactly, would you want to celebrate my birthday, at such short notice?”

“Orders from the Doc. He got stoned with you, didn’t he? Just like him, goes on one of his opium trips, spills his guts, still high the next day and still spilling, then a couple of days later he’s paranoid about security. He wanted me to check you out. I told him not to worry, the detective is my half brother, I trust him implicitly with everything.”

I don’t know how to respond to that, so I let a few beats pass. “So how are your—our—brothers and sisters?”

He frowns. “If I gave the impression they are still alive, I’m afraid I misled you for sentimental reasons. They all took their own lives. I’m the only one left. They pushed us too hard, you see? It’s the way they are, destructive testing is all they know.”

“I’m, ah, sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. I was the only one willing to go all the way.
They
had no idea what
all the way
meant, of course. Clumsy fools. But, as you see, it all worked out brilliantly in the end.” He gives me an assessing smile. “Now
they
are wondering if there is something special in our genes—the ones we inherited from our father.” He shrugs. “But it’s just speculation. Personally, I’m not convinced genes have anything to do with our mutual survival. After all, as I told you, our siblings all failed.”

“Who is
they
?”

He pretends not to have heard my question. I’m in a dilemma here. If I simply continue to humor him, he will become irritated. On the other hand, how else can I handle it? In normal social intercourse one breaks through a level of basic politeness to something more intimate. But with
him
? As usual he has read my mind. It took one flash of those unreal eyes.

“Shall I tell you what the problem is? You will be surprised at how simply it may be expressed.”

“Okay. Tell me.”

“My name. You have not asked me and I have not offered. In your head you still think of me simply as
the Asset,
do you not?”

“Yes,” I confess.

“Ordinarily you would have asked how you should call me—but in my case a name like Jack or John, or even something exotic like Ermenegildo or Bartholomew, wouldn’t do it, would it?” He giggles.

“No.”

“And you think the reason is I am not like others, I’m too different, too weird to deserve or be capable of carrying an ordinary human name—correct?”

If he had used a different tone I might have been afraid of some kind of paranoid outbreak, but he is relaxed, in control, and even slightly humorous in his manner. The waiter brings two tiny langoustine cups as
amuse-bouches.
We devour them in one swallow and call for more
grissini.

“Shall I tell you my real name—at least insofar as any name can be said to be real? Let’s put it another way—would you like to know who I am, really?”

I realize I must answer each of his questions with total honesty. “I’m not sure,” I say.

He grins. “Excellent. Yes, you are quite right. And the reason you are not sure?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because the answer is quite daunting. I know you sense it, though, for you are very intuitive, like me. I’ll give you a clue. It is fortunate that you are a Buddhist. Someone of a more Western persuasion might have a nervous breakdown. So, can you guess?”

“No.”

“Tut-tut. I think you can. But you are too polite. Or afraid of being laughed at. You must not be. I won’t have you anything but frank and open—so much do I love you, my brother.”

“I’m lost. Okay, tell me.”

“I am Jesus Christ, of course.” The
grissini
sticks in my throat, I cough. “Oh, I don’t mean in some ridiculous way of the mentally ill. I can see that thought just flitted across your mind. No, I mean as a matter of pure cultural logic, that is what I am: the Second Coming. Think about it. Two thousand years of unmitigated lies, nauseating superstition, mental and physical torture, genocide, corruption culminating in two world wars which were
Christian
wars—and nothing but war and exploitation ever since—in the end the West must produce the living image of its own twisted path.
Me.
I am the alpha and the omega, but more importantly I am the Thing Itself.” He smiles. “After all, one does need an identity of some kind—at least for the moment. Oh, you must not think of me as that poor jerk on a cross. That was, shall we say, the give-them-a-chance phase. No, if anything I’m more the guy in the middle on the back wall of the Sistine Chapel. Why shouldn’t I kill and send to hell those who have failed me so badly?”

There is indignation in the stiffening of his spine and the flash of his eyes. I decide to plunge into the asparagus crepes, which are really very good, before taking the matter further.

“That’s why you said Rome was your hometown?”

“I said one of them. I do go there a lot. I have a frequent visitor’s pass for the Sistine Chapel. Jerusalem is still hard for me, and as for Bethlehem—have you been there?”

“No.”

“I can assure you that these days it’s not at all the kind of place where you’d expect to find three wise men and a virgin.” He gives a great chesty guffaw.

I stare, openmouthed. What kind of monster is this?

“Actually, it always was a squalid little dump.” He laughs some more. “Is this difficult for you? But as a Buddhist you are aware of the basic truth of rebirth, are you not?”

I hesitate. “Yes.”

“So, you know that in this body one finds only a segment of the whole person, who is, by the way, androgynous. To find the whole being you must add in all the previous lifetimes. Well, someone has to be Jesus, don’t they?”

“I suppose.”

“And don’t tell me you are not aware that my message two thousand years ago was basically Buddhist with a few politically correct references to the Old Testament to keep the Pharisees off my back?”

I cannot eat anymore, appetite cannot survive such conversation. I give up and put down my knife and fork.

“It’s quite true that I did ten years in a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir two thousand years ago.” He frowns. “I had a wonderful time, but all the while there was this awful sense of doom, you know, because I had to go back and get myself crucified. Put rather a dampener on the experience.” He smiles. “But not to worry, it’s all over now. Revenge is mine, I will repay.” He pauses to look me full in the face. “And you will help me.”

The confession that he is God has relaxed him the way a good confession relaxes some perps. It is as if we have exchanged vows of loyalty and now he can speak freely. I decide to try to obtain an admission to the crime of murder by God. I do not have any recording equipment, it would be only my word against his, I would probably not get a conviction, but it would bring some kind of closure.

“Naturally, as Christ you rely entirely on the Father.”

“Naturally.”

“You would not kill without his…direction?”

“He feeds me, like any father. I owe him everything.”

If only he wasn’t sane, there would be no threat to my worldview. I take three folded pieces of paper from my jacket pocket and smooth them out in front of him. One is a fish-eye view of a murder scene in which a young woman has been beheaded. The second concentrates on her head, which has been wrenched from her shoulders. The third is a shot of a mirror on which someone has written in blood,
Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is.

Up to this point I had no idea what my next move would be. I had to know how he assimilated his past actions. How does God deal with his own bad behavior? Will he wrench my head from my shoulders? I am using crude but well-tried tactics here. Now that I have confronted him with hard evidence that a savage killer lives in that splendid body of his along with Jesus Christ, will he explode? Collapse in remorse? Find some theological way around it? But this is a totally new breed of
human
and he doesn’t do any of those things. His training takes over. He turns the pictures around under his hand, examining them curiously.

“This happened where? Why wasn’t I told? Okay, you won’t tell me because I did it. Let us form a plan. We’ll try to catch me together. Let us work it out. You were assigned to the case, so it has to be District 8. The killer—me—has a connection with you, therefore any repeat crime will happen in District 8. That’s got to be where I strike next, and I
will
strike again, because my purpose is to obtain and retain your attention. Why?” He frowns. “Because of the way I was conceived, brought up, enhanced, and trained—I am a killer freak from B movies, a kind of Frankenstein, in desperate need of normal human love and kindness, of a family. I desperately want and need to impress you because in my mind you are all I’ve got, being of close kin. In reality I don’t have anyone at all, I’m deceiving myself that you are in the least interested in me as a brother. All you want is to solve the case, make the streets safe again for young girls, lock me up for life. I am this pathetic fellow so riven by madness he dares not acknowledge the total contradiction between two halves of himself. As in classic psychosis, the one half of the personality is hermetically sealed off from the other. What it all points to is that I not only will kill again soon, but it will be in this same market—the one behind your police station, is it not?”

He pauses to look at me. “That’s the obvious reading, anyway. Have I got it right?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but frowns deeply as if he is consulting himself on where he plans to strike next. “A little
too
obvious, perhaps—you are not entirely convinced, although I’m sure your colleagues would fall for it. But, yes, it will have to be the market again—if I’m so smart, strong, and powerful, I would naturally want to taunt you in the most provocative way.” He looks up at me for a moment, says, “Don’t worry, we’ll catch me,” smiles cheerfully, then returns to the documents I gave him.

I have shifted back from the table, forcing my chair against the wall. This is revealing behavior on my part. If I were physically afraid, I could easily have run out of the restaurant. But you cannot run from this kind of fear. The end of the world does not need any component of violence to terrify us. Here is a man of superhuman powers who wants to recruit me into hunting himself.

I make an excuse to break off the lunch. He looks up, nods at me briefly, and returns to his study of the scene of the crime. He does not seem surprised or offended. I feel an intense frustration that he didn’t break and confess. I want to yell at him, rub his face in the evidence:
No, you are not Jesus, you are a psychopath.
I guess every shrink has wanted to do that from time to time. But I’m not a shrink, I’m a cop. Until now the weirdness of the world has been clearly defined by law and practice. Outside of those definitions I’m as lost as you, R. I stand up, make my apology, stare at him in disbelief. Already he has made those pieces of paper his own. He
will
find the perp. Using his training and enhancements he will track himself down sooner or later.

What kind of insanity is this?
Is he telling me he will murder again, in that same market, as a way of relating to me?
When balance fails the mind can go on twisting forever, it seems.