Read The Godfather of Kathmandu Online
Authors: John Burdett
I’m shaking my head at the impenetrable mystery, at the same time wishing there were a window to look out of. “No window,” I say to Sukum.
“Didn’t you look at the room rates? A room with a window is double the cost of one without.”
“But we’re dealing with a successful Hollywood director, the most spoiled subspecies of human being that exists on earth. How could he possibly make a decision based on a five-hundred-baht difference?”
Sukum scratches his head and shrugs: a
farang
issue on which he is not qualified to speak. “Maybe he didn’t want windows.”
“He wanted a bathroom, though. Rooms without bathrooms are even cheaper.”
Sukum and I check out the bathroom: tiny, with a flush toilet crammed next to a shower stall with a torn curtain. There are no clues here. Indeed, that is another paradox. In a case involving extreme violence, you don’t normally find the perpetrator’s mind organized enough for such a thorough cleanup. Apart from the blood on the floor, there was no circumstantial evidence to follow up on at all. It almost has the mark of a professional slaying; but professionals do not indulge in such a baroque style. Nor do they eat their victims’ brains: it would ruin their reputation, and they’d never get any more work.
Stumped! I’ve never come across anything like it. Violence, you see, is a form of lust, a primitive kind of consumerism: early capitalism, you might say. Just as it is impossible for you to buy a dream house without first fantasizing about it, so with the love objects of killers. They are driven by compelling images just as irresistible to them as dog-snoring-in-front-of-fireplace-while-cute-kids-play-safely-on-lawn may be to you,
farang
—lacking your discretion, however, they tend to end up with an ugly piece of meat, whereas you merely get stuck with a subprime mortgage. Rage turns to ashes: panic. But I see none of that here; nor do I feel it. For the perpetrator to saw open the victim’s skull, they would have had to concentrate for as much as ten minutes, being careful not to cut into the delicate, spectacular, crimson spider web of the
arachnoid mater
—the inner membrane which protects the brain. But why would you worry about the
arachnoid mater
of someone you were about to kill, especially when you intend to dig into it for supper? After the perp finished they must have carefully put away the rotary saw and the knife they used to cut him open, neither of which have been found, and coolly departed the premises. I’m
not entirely displeased that it’s Sukum’s case, not mine. Dead end: we stare at each other and shrug.
Downstairs, Lek does not seem to be faring well with the desk clerk. When Sukum and I exit the elevator we walk into a
katoey
shouting match. In Thailand people rarely express their feelings in public; but this is Nana and these are transsexuals, and they both hail from the Northeast, so they are yelling in their own dialect of Lao, which neither I nor Sukum understand. Finally Lek, who, much as he loathes physical violence has no problem with a really good mouth fight on the fishwife model, says something to make the other
katoey
start to walk around his desk. He is big and fat, so Sukum and I quickly come between them. When I get Lek outside he is still cursing the other while repeatedly pushing his long black hair back with both hands; but he quickly recovers. “The victim, the American, he used this place all the time—at least five times a week,” Lek explains. “He had an arrangement with the management. He kept the key to the room and rented it on a monthly basis. He got them to agree to change the lock so that only senior management had a key, which they kept in a private safe off the premises. He usually brought girls here in twos, sometimes threes. The sessions never lasted more than a couple of hours. On the other hand, sometimes he would have as many as three sessions in one day.”
“So what were you arguing with that
katoey
about?”
Lek pushes his hair back again and shakes himself.
“Somtam
salad. What else? We’re Isaan.”
I’m at the station sitting at my desk staring at the computer monitor after having consulted the online I-Ching for the hundredth time today. I want to know if Pichai has been reborn already, or if he is waiting for Chanya and me to make love so he can come back to us (does he know his former mother is now a nun?), or if my visions were correct and he really does intend to hang out on some higher plane until the appearance of the Maitreya Buddha. (I Googled him, by the way—the Maitreya Buddha, I mean—and I have to report a serious schism in the Mahayana cosmology here. The earliest we can expect him is in three thousand years, but there are others who doubt he’ll show for a hundred thousand—apparently what is left of humanity will have had enough of beautiful cars and luxury condos by then and be quite rabid for the transcendent.) The Book of Changes is more than usually gnomic today, however, and the best it can offer is Hexagram 52: “Ken/ Keeping Still, Mountain.” There are no moving lines to help me pin down the advice, but the commentary is not without resonance:
It is very difficult to bring quiet to the heart. While Buddhism strives for rest through an ebbing away of all movement in nirvana, the Book of Changes holds that rest is merely a state of polarity that always posits movement as its complement. Possibly the words of the text embody directions for the practice of yoga
.
It strikes me,
farang
, that with its insistence on constant movement the I-Ching might be a better guide for you than our Buddhism. I can’t see you ebbing into nirvana just yet, frankly, not with all those lovely wars going on, and all that restless money sloshing around all over the planet. (Sorry, I’m in one of those moods.) As for yoga, I’ll believe it when they’re doing head-stands at the New York Stock Exchange. Anyway, I see from a pop-up that the FBI has just sent me an e-mail:
This must be one of the easiest assignments of my career. I got most of it from the Net and the rest from a few contacts in LA. Frank Charles was a phenomenally successful TV and movie director, if you measure success in terms of dough. He incorporated as Patna Productions Inc. and got rich from making sloppy romantic B movies, then selling the franchises to TV for serialization. He had the smarts to make sentimentality look respectable for the middlebrow educated without losing the masses. Looks like he started out wanting to make art-house feature films, based on French and Italian movies of his generation: Truffaut, Bertolucci, Fellini—all that crowd. He did make one film—his first full-length feature—in the American noir genre called
Black Wednesday
, which got a lot of critical acclaim but wasn’t a great commercial success. Looks like he took the hint and did a deal with the devil. It was mostly schmaltz schmaltz schmaltz all the way to the bank after that, with a feature film every eighteen months. He married neurotic starlets five times, had one child, a girl, by one of them, let them take him to the cleaners on divorce, but it didn’t seem to dent his wealth. After the fifth marriage fell apart he started using professionals in a regular way, which is what took him over there about ten years ago. Like a lot of men, one visit was all it took for him to get addicted to your red-light districts. He hasn’t done any serious film work for a decade and Patna Productions was formally dissolved about six years ago. After that he seems to have gotten involved in Asian real estate (stories about him buying in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan), which made him yet another fortune. The more money he made, the more miserable he got: there’s an exclusive interview with
Vanity Fair
in which he comes out with a full confession of disillusionment with the system, money, etc., I mean, he just about breaks every American taboo, and especially every Hollywood taboo, by saying how
miserable money and success have made him and maybe he should have done something else with his life that would have left him with more self-respect and less money. Actually, he comes across on the Net as having been a nice guy who hated his work but couldn’t give up the wealth. Which I don’t quite buy. I mean, the subtext of this interview with
Vanity Fair
is that his soul was somehow damaged by the notorious bad taste of America. That may be true, but he has been a major contributor to our philistinism, and let’s face it, no matter how much irony and cynicism he brought to his work, to be that good at the sunset ending he must have had a generous dose of Jell-O in his own heart. Also, he was said to be ferocious in business. No criminal record as such, but quite a few run-ins with Hollywood cops regarding prostitution. He escaped prosecution, but everyone knew what he was up to. Now here’s something you might be able to pick up on. After he first started going east, he tried taking Thai girls back with him to LA to be his companions for a week or two at a time (occasionally, more than one girl at a time). He made the mistake of showing up in public, at parties, etc., with these girls, and got the cold shoulder from the matriarchs, so he had to stop. Instead, he spent more and more time in Bangkok without anyone knowing: he simply had his phone calls patched through to his hotel or condo, and then e-mail came along to make it all easier still. Lately, he seems to have tried to mend his karma by taking up various forms of mysticism. There are reports of him making a fool of himself telling people at LA dinner parties about Hinduism, Buddhism, mystic Christianity—he didn’t seem able to make up his mind.
Frankly, with that kind of background, I would follow the money. I’ll try to find out if anyone over there knows of a will—I mean, who stood to benefit by his death? His daughter and her mother would be the first place I would look. I know that doesn’t fit with the cannibalism, but who knows? Maybe the macabre is just a smoke screen here? Money does strange things to all people.
Kimberley
In the meantime, the Chief has summoned me to his office. Do you think he’s worried about our slow progress with the Frank Charles murder? No, neither do I.
• • •
“He wants the money next week,” Vikorn says in a tone of bewilderment.
He is standing at his window looking down at the illegal cooked-food stalls in the street, which specialize in the cuisinary preferences of District 8 cops:
somtam
salad, chicken satay,
tom yum gung
, pad thai, crispy duck for Vikorn and his two deputies, steamed broccoli with peanut sauce for his secretary, Manny, fried rice, spring rolls, mango with sticky rice, lotus-root water for Lek, vegetable dumplings, fried mussels in butter, spicy roast beef—those are the main ones. There are so many stalls eager and ready to assist the Royal Thai Police—each of which must have its own set of chairs and tables that it will not share with other stalls—that the whole open-air kitchen stretches for more than half a mile on either side of the station; any cop foolish enough to complain about street congestion gets traffic duty at the Sukhumvit-Asok interchange.
“Who does?”
“Your Halloween Buddhist up there in those fucking mountains. Who does he think I am, George Soros?”
“Tietsin? But he doesn’t get paid until he delivers.”
My Colonel glares. “That’s the point. He wants to deliver next week. He’s the keenest wholesaler I’ve ever heard of. How can anyone get hold of forty million dollars’ worth of smack that quickly? Did you do the math?”
“Five hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three point three recurring.” (Of course I did the math, I’m the consigliere, aren’t I?) “Basically, five hundred and thirty-three kilos, or eleven hundred and seventy-six pounds, which is a little over half an American ton: point five eight eight of a ton, to be precise.” I stop to take a breath. “You don’t have the money?”
Vikorn holds up his arms. In a tone of confusion he says, “No.” I wait for the coda. “Sure, I can get it, of course, but it takes time. Nobody moves money around like that these days. It’s unheard of. Forty million in liquid, or as good as?” He smacks his forehead. “I was expecting to receive the stuff in installments, a million’s worth here, two million’s worth there.”
“Can’t you sell something? What about your row of chalets on Phuket? Or that strip of prime riverfront property on the Mekong up near Nong Kai?”
These sound like desperate measures, but I am factoring in the great carrot Tietsin has dangled: the money and the power to establish total dominance over General Zinna, to literally wipe him out.
“It’s the wrong time to sell real estate. Anyway, you can’t sell stuff like that overnight. And I’m not even sure I’d get forty million. Everyone’s shifting to Phnom Penh for real estate, and Sihanoukville, on the Cambodian coast. Thailand has screwed itself by being standoffish toward foreign investors. Apparently Cambodia is pristine and wide open, everyone’s scrambling to get in on the ground floor. Then there’s Vietnam and Malaysia. There’s even a rumor the Laos Socialist government is about to collapse, or do a quick double shuffle into unrestrained capitalism—imagine the profit for those who’ve already invested there.”
I stand with arms hanging. “So, why not tell him he has to wait?”
“I did. Politely. After all, he’s potentially a huge business partner, and I don’t want to offend him. But he’s not happy. Can he really deliver all that dope next week?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why is he in such a hurry?”
I shrug. “He didn’t say. He just said his movement needs the money.”
Vikorn’s eyes sharpen. “What’s he planning, the invasion of China?” I do not say,
I wouldn’t put it past him
. “Have you been watching the news recently?”
“No.”
“Those demonstrations in India and Lhasa, led by Tibetan monks. A hundred of them blown away by the Chinese. That wouldn’t be anything to do with him?”
“I have no idea. I think it’s inevitable, they’re trying to embarrass Beijing before the Olympic Games.”
Vikorn looks at me. “Yes. I guess if you’re a Tibetan, this is your big chance. Now or never.”
“They don’t have
never,”
I say with one of those superior smiles he hates so much, “only
now.”