The Godfather of Kathmandu (2 page)

Lek is pulling at my sleeve; he has something private and confidential to communicate. “Look, I’ve got to go now, let’s meet for a brainstorming session sometime soon. It’s okay, your name will be on the file, I don’t want any credit, just the honor of helping out in a spectacular case.” I smile as Lek pulls me out of the room. At the door I add, “I know you’ve thought of it already, Detective Sukum, but just in case it has inexplicably escaped your notice, the victim was not staying here. No clothes or other signs of habitation, you see, only a few books. I would check with all the five-star hotels hereabout, if I were you.” Sukum knows so little about
farang
, he still doesn’t get it. “He was probably hiring the room for sex, while living in some five-star suite at the Dusit Thani or something.” Sukum nods, trying to get his head around the idea that someone might rent two hotel rooms at the same time, just to be discreet. Now that really does say
ruey ruey
in Thai: fabulously rich.

In the lift on the way back to the ground floor, a silent trickle of tears flows down Lek’s cheeks.

Lek has me trapped at a cooked-food stall on the sidewalk off Soi 11. It’s lunchtime by now, and all the tables are full. There is a traffic jam to my left and iron railings to my right. Lek sits opposite, staring resentfully. “I can’t believe what you just did,” he says. We have ordered and the food has arrived—
tom yam gung
for Lek, green sweet rabbit curry for me; neither of us can eat.

“I told you, I’ve found the path, you should be pleased.”

“For five years you’ve been the guy who has to get promoted next. It’s outrageous that the committee hasn’t promoted you yet. If it was up to Colonel Vikorn, you would have been promoted years ago. Even your enemies think you should get promoted. Sukum’s okay, but he’s not inspired. You’re a genius.”

“They’ll never promote me. You know that. People put up with me as a lowly detective. If I rise any higher, people will start talking about my
farang
blood. You know how Thais are. Totally fair-minded Buddhists, until their personal income is threatened. Anyway, I told you, I’m almost there, Lek. A few more sessions with Tietsin and I’ll be an awakened being.”

“That charlatan. I hate him.”

“You’ve never met him.”

“I hate him for what he’s doing to you in your time of grief.” Lek covers his face, lest I see my suffering there. He has become like the picture of Dorian Gray: I see in him the reality I dare not see in myself. I turn away.

“I’m not really a genius. It’s just that my English sometimes gives me an advantage. D’you know how I guessed about the pebble and the imago and the trepanning? It’s all in the titles of the books and screenplays—”

Lek wipes his face and tuts. “I don’t give a shit how you did it, I only care about you, and that Tibetan witch is destroying you.” He stares at me with simple country love, then calls for a can of beer. When the Singha arrives he says, “Drink it.”

“I can’t, Lek,” I say, shuddering slightly at the can and its implications.

“If you love me, if you have any regard left for me, drink it.”

“Lek—”

“You’re scared, aren’t you? That’s an artificial high you’re on, I think you were smoking dope last night while you were reading witchcraft—”

“It’s not witchcraft, it’s Tibetan Buddhism—”

“So, if it’s not witchcraft, drink a can of beer. Just one. I’ve seen you sink ten in a row. But you’re terrified of the comedown, aren’t you? Just one little can of beer bursts your balloon—that’s why he’s a charlatan, that Tibetan witch.”

Wearily, because I love him, I guess—he might be the only one left—I drink the beer. He’s right, the very modest intake of alcohol bursts the bubble. I feel the onset of paranoia. Lek pays for the food and takes my hand, leads me to the nearest cab. It doesn’t matter that we’re going to sit in a traffic jam, it’s the relative privacy of the backseat Lek is looking for. When I close my eyes I see what is always there, like a video playing on the back of my forehead: a car—it was a silver Toyota Echo—taking the turn into the
soi
, hitting my six-year-old son, Pichai, where he was standing in the street after getting out of a taxi. Chanya only slightly injured in her left foot, refusing help, taking Pichai to the hospital, calling me on my cell phone. I arrived at the operating theater just in time for his death.

Chanya couldn’t handle it any better than I could. She became a novice nun at a radical forest convent out in Mukdahan, on the border with Laos. They still meditate over pictures of dead bodies there. She turned into a fanatic, observing and merging with every stage of human decomposition. For my part, I found Doctor Norbu Tietsin, the mad Tibetan mind master. Let’s say he showed me how to orbit the earth, as an alternative to living on it. The technique doesn’t go with alcohol, though. Even a small amount is inimical to spiritual evolution; alcohol is a death drug, a devil brew from the lands of the setting sun. It drags the spirit back into the body: more torture.

“I’m going to have to roll a joint, Lek,” I say, suddenly feverish.

“Not in the taxi, for Buddha’s sake.” He stays my hand, which is reaching for the small bag of pot I’m never without these days. “Master, face it, you’re bipolar. Your tragedy has done this to you. With help you can get over it. Real help, hospital help.
Farang
help.”

“Sorry, Lek,” I say, and pull the handle to open the door and get out of the cab. “It’s an emergency.”

It’s been no more than an hour, but I’ve forgotten all about the gigantic dead American and the theatrical circumstances of his murder. I’m concerned with how to survive the next five minutes. It happens that the cab has stopped in the jam outside the Rose Garden on Soi 7, where I’m quite well known. I dash through the bar to the toilets, where I find a booth and roll a joint, but I can’t stand the claustrophobia, so I leave the booth as soon as the joint is rolled. While I’m feverishly smoking, I check out some of the signs on the wall above the pissoirs, which warn that the establishment is not responsible for the behavior of the women who use the bar to solicit customers, and advises patrons to take note of a girl’s identity card before taking her back to a hotel. There’s a female worker in the process of cleaning the toilets, but she doesn’t seem to notice the acrid stench of my joint. I retreat to a cubicle to sit on the throne and soak myself in a damn good cry.

We were going to talk about
psychosis, farang
. The word, I believe, means perforation of the psyche: we must imagine a delicate net of filaments, like the old-fashioned mantles of gas lamps, which, due to ill-treatment by life, people, and gods, suffer irreversible damage, leaving cancerous black holes where the clear light of unimpeded consciousness once radiated. Actually, it is a mystery which cannot be penetrated without resort to myth, metaphor, and magic, but we’ll keep it simple for now. Nor can it be understood without reference to the law of karma: cause and effect. I kick you, you kick me back. Confession: I provoked the world and the world turned on me. The private history of my fragmentation is as follows.

I have only myself to blame. For years my boss, mentor, and surrogate father Police Colonel Vikorn nagged me to get him a set of DVDs of the
Godfather
series, with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. The problem all along was that I only could find editions with Thai subtitles, and Vikorn is too lazy to read and watch the action at the same time. Finally, Lek found an illegally dubbed set of a reasonable standard and I gave them to Vikorn on his last birthday. According to his Wife Four, who was down from his mansion in Chiang Mai to do her tour of duty at his house in Bangkok (he likes to operate a roster, which the wives appreciate since it enables them to know when they are free for full-time shopping and when they are required to perform marital chores), he devoured all the DVDs in one long, whisky-enhanced sitting.

His verdict, the next day, was carefully balanced. I have indelibly burned into my memory cells the image of him sitting behind his vast,
empty desk, with the DVD set dumped in his out-box, like a solved case. His posture was both regal and forensic, although he brushed his hand over his short gray hair and stood up when he got bored with sitting down. He is of average height, muscular, given to wearing the homely brown fatigues of a police colonel the way Napoléon wore his old uniform to reassure the troops (Vikorn is a multimillionaire; some even use the B word to describe his wealth); but for a man in his midsixties he moves with an unusual suppleness; only gangsters are so feline at his age. In his considered opinion old Corleone was a total sissy for refusing to trade in smack, and Sollozzo was well within his rights to try to have him bumped off. My Colonel even honored me with one of his famous analects:

“What’s wrong with trafficking in heroin? The smack goes to Europe or America. Some self-obsessed narcissist who otherwise would be causing untold pollution driving to and from work every day, probably in a car without passengers, only to go burning electricity in an overheated office somewhere—thanks to us he stays home in a stupor and gets the sack. His work gets outsourced to Bangladesh, where someone does the same job better for a fifth of the pay, which he uses to feed a family of seven, and to top it all he commutes to work on a bicycle—the whole earth benefits.”

On the other hand, he liked the ruthless way young Michael Corleone cleared out the opposition after the Don had been shot, but doubted it was really necessary to flee New York and start over in Las Vegas. With better planning and more efficient use of funds, contacts, and leverage, the Corleones could have bridged the country like a colossus with a foot on both coasts. He loved the way they severed the head of the racehorse to intimidate Jack Woltz, but despised them for failing properly to capitalize on the wheeze: “They could have had the whole film industry wrapped up after that. This is the problem with
farang jao paw:
they’re shortsighted, triumphalistic, and they don’t have Buddhist restraint or humility—that’s why I hate dealing with them.”

But there was one feature of the Don’s setup that intrigued Vikorn and brought that gleam into his eyes which invariably spells danger for someone, usually me. “That light-skinned
farang
who’s not as hairy as the others—what’s his name?”

“Hagen. He’s light-skinned because he’s Irish-born. Vito Corleone adopted him after Sonny Corleone dragged him in off the street one day. The Don sent him to law school.”

“Yeah, that one. What do they call him, his job title?”

“Consigliere.”

“Right,” he said, looking directly into my eyes.

As usual, he had taken me by surprise. I had thought we were discussing an old movie nobody talks about anymore. I had not detected any signals that we were discussing the rest of my life.

“No,” I said. “Don’t even think about it. You know me, I’m the biggest wimp on the force, I only survive through your patronage, in ten years of active service I’ve never killed anyone, not even by accident—isn’t that despicable? All the real men on the force think I might be a secret
katoey
, a ladyboy like Lek—” I was stuttering a little at this point, for while I was speaking my subconscious was delivering pictures of me full of holes bent over a car hood somewhere in Klong Toey, near the river. Or maybe in the river itself.

“I, I, I have this Bu-, Bu-, Bu-, Buddhist conscience, I really do try to follow the Eightfold Path, I mean I take it seriously, I don’t juh-, juh-, just go to temple, I study Buddhism, I probably know more about Buddhism than the average monk, you said it yourself, I’m a monk manqué—no.” I said it again, more to convince myself than him, “No. No, no, no way I could be anybody’s consigliere.”

He was gazing at me more with amusement than irritation. “Have you discussed it with your mother?”

Aghast: “My mother? Of course not, you’ve only just mentioned it.”

He let me have one of his tiger smiles. “Don’t get so excited, that’s always been your weakness, your nerves are way too close to the surface. That’s because your rising sign is a Wood Rabbit.”

“I know, I know, and you’re a Metal Dragon.”

“Exactly. And you work for me.” He raised a hand at my sudden anger. “It’s okay, I’m not ordering you to do anything except think about it—and discuss it with your womenfolk. If you don’t want to talk about it with your mother, at least discuss it with Chanya.”

“My wife?” I was about to protest that no way would my devout Buddhist partner (we’ve started using that word over here, where—as we shall see—the definition of
wife
is somewhat loose) encourage me to play consigliere to a
jao paw
, a godfather; then I realized he must already have done some lobbying or he would never have mentioned my mother or Chanya.

“Okay,” I said, because it was the only way to close the interview, “I’ll talk about it with Nong and Chanya.”

I was pretty sure he’d somehow gotten my mother, Nong, on his side, probably using the weight of his money—he owns a majority of shares in her go-go bar on Soi Cowboy, the Old Man’s Club—but I was confident of my darling Chanya, a female
arhat
, or Buddhist saint, far more advanced than myself, an attainment all the more remarkable in that she spent years on the Game herself. No, Chanya was
my
conscience, not his. Furthermore, she had grown increasingly respectable in her attitudes since giving birth to Pichai, our now six-year-old son, to the extent that she had even started hinting at a legal marriage. So far, we had remained content with a Buddhist ceremony in her home village. I paid her mother fourteen thousand dollars in the form of a dowry, even though she was technically damaged goods within the village price structure: her mum knew I was a junior shareholder in my mother’s business and shrewdly concluded I was worth a lot more than my cop’s salary. (Chanya, by the way, had to wash my feet as part of the ceremony, a benchmark event which we reminded each other of from time to time—it’s a two-edged sword in any argument.)

More terrified than depressed by Vikorn’s offer of promotion in his import-export franchise, I rushed home that day. Chanya was playing with Pichai in the yard of our little house—Pichai was the reincarnation of my former police partner and soul brother, whose name was also Pichai, who died in the cobra case years ago—and I had to carry on the conversation while Pichai crawled all over me and tried to pull my gun out from where I had shoved it under my belt in the small of my back.