The Godfather of Kathmandu (39 page)

“But you killed Frank Charles. I mean, you set him up as a mascot knowing the Japanese would kill him sooner or later?”

“Detective, you are a terrible naïf, and this leads you to misjudge human character. You are still thinking of Frank as a victim, just because he got bumped off. Actually, it was the opposite. When
farang
get greedy, they have no restraint. Once he knew how the whole scam worked, he became a fanatic. Ah Ting begged him to calm down, he was selling too much, upsetting the balance. He not only ignored her, he mastered the technique himself. He started heating the gems up to sixteen hundred degrees Centigrade and adding the beryllium—he became very good at it, approached the whole process much more methodically than any of our people. He even invested in proper electric kilns and a cooking recipe that enabled him to control the timing down to the microsecond. You see,
Detective, the bottom line about Frank Charles, the source of his being, you might say, was greed. A nice enough guy, and he really did want to make a halfway decent film at least once in his life, but he was thwarted by his own greed all the way. Frank Charles was just greedy, greedy, greedy. That’s why he got so fat, and why he had to have ten naked girls in his Jacuzzi on his sixtieth birthday—no fancy psychological component, just old-fashioned greed and the American predatory spirit.”

I’m tired of being mocked for my naïveté, so I take a long while to think the whole case through. After five minutes I’m still shaking my head. “But the way he was killed, Mimi—the way he died?”

She takes a cool toke from the cheroot and stubs it out. “Have you any idea how anal-retentive Japanese jewelers are? They are like brilliant insects working at the microscopic level all their lives, shaving off a micron here, a micron there, dominating their world at a level of detail designed to induce madness. No wonder they are all men. The passion to control is off the human scale. Imagine such a man consumed by hatred and the lust for revenge?”

I blink rapidly. “But whoever the perp was, he would have needed a copy of the film, and would have needed to know that the film had not been released, that no one of importance knew about it—”

I stop, because Moi has given a single, short glance toward the interior of the house where the maid has retreated. Obviously, she will not say another word of relevance to the case. I guess she doesn’t need to. Nevertheless, I try one last question. “It was in the interests of Kongrao to provide the sacrificial goat? To facilitate both the assassination and the perfect alibi—namely, that the victim killed himself on film? That’s why Witherspoon, who is Kongrao, was ordered to send me the movie? You are still trading with the Japanese? I suppose they had to be placated somehow?”

Moi doesn’t say anything. The interview is over. I have only one ace left: “Doctor, the toxicologist found tubocurarine chloride in his blood. How would a jeweler get hold of it? How would a jeweler even know he needed it? Frank Charles was
paralyzed but fully conscious
when Suzuki cut into his skull, removed it, and
ate his brains.”

For an answer, the Doctor gives me that smile, the one where the corners of the lips crawl up the incisors.

I leave and walk through the house to the other side. There is no sign
of the maid, but two of Moi’s outside guards are chatting to the cop who is waiting in the marked car I came in. They straighten up when they see me, but I can tell they’ve been smirking over some yarn with my driver. I get in the back of the car instead of sitting in front the way I normally do. “Where to?” he asks. I stare out the side window at Moi’s magnificent house, and at the river behind it, and at the kids from the shantytown yelling as they dive naked from the jetty. “It’s the strangest story you ever heard,” I tell the driver, still staring at the skinny kids. “Once upon a time a rich man arrived here from the West. It turned out he was lost in a dream in which he foretold the manner of his own death down to the last detail.”

“What? Where do you want to go?”

I think about that. “Silom,” I say. “That dingy three-star hotel opposite the Hindu temple.”

The temple is called Sri Mariamman, and there is the usual crowd of flower, incense, and amulet sellers hanging around outside it. I have no idea why there should be a Hindu temple in the middle of Bangkok, but it’s incredibly famous and holy, to judge by the amount of ochre and crimson powder people chuck all over its shrines, and the number of half-naked Indian holy men who arrive from places like Varanasi to worship here; generally they like to stay in the same three-star flophouse where Mr. Suzuki, the Japanese jeweler, committed suicide. Strictly speaking there is no forensic need to visit Suzuki’s former room; the evidence relating to his suicide will be in storage at a police station somewhere. But I feel a kind of animal need to be in the place where the little Japanese man—according to one of the newspaper reports he was just five foot two—worked himself up into a controlled orgasm of rage. I’m not entirely surprised that the superstitious Thai manager has kept the room vacant for the moment, and even placed some lotus buds to float in a brass bowl of water outside the door. He lets me in without question once I’ve flashed my ID. It is, indeed, a very small room, renting for only five hundred baht per night. The tiny window, no doubt perfectly clean on the inside, is dark with city pollution. Suzuki moved here from the five-star hotel he was staying in with the trade delegation, after his colleagues all went home. Did they appoint him as assassin? Did they know what he intended? Surely he must have needed help?

Against all logic, I prefer to think of the little guy working on his own. I don’t want to believe he used a pack of
yakuza
thugs to carry out his plan, although police reports suggest there were a few accompanying the delegation as bodyguards. I think he somehow maneuvered Frank Charles into his room in the flophouse on Soi 4/4 all on his own through sheer force of personality; how he stuck the lumbering giant with a syringe full of tubocurarine chloride is more of a challenge than my imagination can handle, however. Once he had paralyzed the American with his venom, did he use the room’s DVD player so that he could check he was following Frank Charles’s own instructions for his gaudy “suicide,” or had he watched the movie so many times he retained perfect recall? He would have needed a rotary saw, of course, but for a master jeweler that would not have been a problem.

Suzuki, more than anyone, had been destroyed by Frank Charles and Kongrao’s scam—utterly wiped out, according to reports, and left with an impossible pile of debts. It seems he had seen the padparadscha trade as his chance for jewelers’ stardom and wagered all his savings, even mortgaged his business, in order to buy the brilliantly colored sapphires that turned out to be worth only a tiny fraction of what he paid for them. A man of honor and a passionate practitioner of the Japanese sport of kendo, I think he was also a dark introvert who told nobody what he intended to do; rather, he expected that the nobility of his last act would redeem him posthumously in the eyes of his society. I think of him working on Frank Charles’s drugged body plopped all over that narrow bed on Soi 4/4, carefully marking out on the American’s cranium where he had to cut in accordance with the movie. I imagine the demon of vengeance taking full possession of the little man’s disciplined soul.
He ate the brains right out of the skull, raw like sushi
. Apparently, a few hours after he killed Frank Charles he returned here to disembowel himself while sitting on the floor cross-legged facing the dirty window.

When I find out from the station where Suzuki’s personal effects are being held, I go over to the storage depot and sign a form. I wait in a dusty office while a clerk brings me an unusually long metal box, which she opens in front of me. According to the rules I am supposed to put on a pair of plastic gloves; I do so in order to pick up the heavy object in one corner of the box. It is much smaller than I imagined, far smaller than the kind of rotary saws that surgeons use, but I guess it is just as powerful, if not more so. In any event, the disk is easily big enough to cut through a quarter inch
of human bone, and, of course, being a tool of the jewelry trade, the disk’s edge is enhanced with industrial diamonds. It is also encrusted with blood. And then there is the other kind of disk, a DVD, black and wordless on the title side; I pick it up to examine it, turning it in the light so I can see where the band of data has been burned into the plastic, then replace it. The other object of interest—and the reason why the box needed to be so long—is a samurai sword; its blade, still bloodstained, is wrapped in a clear plastic sheath. I’m not an expert, but I would judge from the damascene pattern and the perfect heft that it must be of the highest quality.

I am afraid there is not much to do but sigh. I could, of course, have the bloodstains on the saw tested to see if the blood belonged to Frank Charles, but I don’t really have the time. Tietsin is dropping the smack tomorrow. And anyway, who cares? As far as the world is concerned, two unrelated suicides, one a diminutive Japanese jeweler, the other a fantastically outsized American movie director, happened to occur within hours of each other on the same night in Bangkok. What else is new? And that’s just the way Kongrao and the Japanese gem traders want it left. But I had to solve the case, didn’t I?

Tietsin is dropping the smack tomorrow:
you did notice me coyly slip this dangerous intelligence between the plump thighs of the previous chapter,
farang?
Are your knees trembling the way mine are right now? Don’t you wish you were stoned? I do. Under the contract he only has to give us twenty-four hours’ notice within a certain time window. I faxed him a copy of the letter of credit so his bankers could check it, and he sent me a text message yesterday consisting of a single word—
tomorrow
—and I’ve been up all night. I’ve vomited in the sink twice already and it’s only six in the morning.
I’m not going through with it
, I tell my face in the mirror.
Oh yes, you are
, the face replies. My own mind has conspired against me: I have no options anymore.
Supposing some of them are kids who use the stuff?
I ask myself.
You accepted Vikorn’s money, didn’t you, you took the job. Are you a man at all?
So it goes on, the war of the self against the self. I do believe I might be turning 100 percent
farang
. But I have one of those wily Oriental solutions up my sleeve, which you’ll probably despise for not being confrontational enough, but it might just do the trick, even if Vikorn snuffs me for it, which he certainly will. I don’t care. I’d rather die early and (relatively) innocent. Look at my record: more than ten years in the Royal Thai Police and I’ve committed no major crime, nor even a minor one as far as I can recall. (I’m not including smoking dope; sometimes the law is wrong.) Is there another serving officer who can swear on the Pali Canon that he is equally clean? No, the hell with it, Tara is never coming to live with me in Bangkok, so there’s no use kidding myself I have a life at all; what’s to lose?

Do you also have the martyr cutoff psychology,
farang?
The kind that says,
Only so much and so far, I prefer death to further degradation?
It’s quite a powerful mantra, but you risk having to put your life where your mouth is sooner or later.

Now you’re saying,
So why didn’t you think of this before, why leave it to the last minute?
Answer: cowardice. I just didn’t want to face it. I’m coming out of an extended Hamlet moment: I just couldn’t make up my mind. Now I have. And the Buddha, for once, is quite explicit. He visited me last night in a dream, in the form of a child’s plastic Buddha. He actually told me how to get out of this fix. The only trouble with advice straight from Gautama himself, though: he doesn’t place any value on flesh at all. I mean, to him, there’s no difference between the two shores; he is master of both. Now I’m not sure if the dread in the bottom of my gut is from the crime or the Buddha’s plan to prevent it.

It is a common observation among Buddhists of all persuasions that after death one is not initially aware of one’s altered state; the clue comes from the people around who can no longer see or hear you, and in this sense the condition cannot be said to differ greatly from your basic urban paranoia:
Am I dead already? Have I always been that way?
These are the kinds of thoughts which illuminate a mind focused wonderfully by the knowledge that it may well be slotted before morning. Nevertheless, I’m off to the local hardware store at the bottom of the street, which sells gas bottles for cooking. I choose two of medium size—the kind that can supply the cooking needs of a normal Thai family for a month—then buy two little camping gas burners—are you beginning to get the picture,
farang?
—and take everything home in a taxi. Then I buy my first car. Well, why not? I’m consigliere, I deserve a car. In view of its short life expectancy, however, I go for a secondhand Toyota. The more I develop my secret plan, the prouder and scareder I become. It’s now midday. The next few hours are going to be tough; I see quite a few joints coming on.

Now I’m at the station not half as stoned as I would like to be, fiddling with paperwork, making constant checks on my cell phone to see if Tietsin has texted me again, even though I would have heard the bleep if he had. I’m waiting for the final signal that will tell me which of twenty named locations in Bangkok the Tibetan will actually use for the drop.
He has calculated that even Vikorn and Zinna together cannot ambush twenty separate drop-off points to steal his product without paying for it—not without drawing undue attention to themselves, anyway—so he faxed a map with twenty different crosses on it. General Zinna immediately pointed out that half the locations were on the river, so the Tibetan was surely planning to come by water. Vikorn sees it differently:
He’s probably trying to make us think he’s coming by river because he’s not
.

The question—
How is he going to bring the stuff into the country?
— has brought the two old dogs together in a competitive kind of way. I have had to attend bull sessions in the General’s map room, as if the Tibetan were preparing to invade Bangkok. Basically, Zinna is convinced the stuff will come by sea and be taken up the Chao Phraya River by sampan. Vikorn doubts there is time for the sea route, which is exactly what intrigues him as a fellow professional: how do you shift that much smack across a modern border and get away with it? As far as he can see there are only two solutions: overland from Cambodia or overland from Burma. But in both cases, the Tibetan has to get the stuff out of the Himalayas first, not easy in the present climate. Even if he has bent people in the Nepali government, there is still India to deal with. Vikorn only pretends to have a view on how Tietsin will bring it off; in reality he is waiting to find out. You can see why the cop is richer than the general.