Bangkok Tattoo Read online

  “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.

  18

  Flashback: I was having a quiet morning pottering around the Old Man’s Club when my cell phone started ringing. It was Lieutenant Manhatsirikit at her least glamorous.

  “Get over here, pronto.”

  I showered quickly and grabbed a cab, only to discover when I arrived that it was not a shoot-out or an investigation by the Crime Suppression Division (our anticorruption bureau: everyone’s worst scenario) but an interpretation job. I’m the only one in the station who speaks English worth a damn, so they tend to drag me in whenever there’s a farang who needs terrifying. (Hard to convey the finer points of intimidation if the perp doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.) This guy, though, was something else: the kind of shaved skull like a pink coconut that belongs on the end of a battering ram, a fat round face bursting with Neolithic fury, small eyes, ironmongery hanging from his pincushion ears, short and incredibly muscular arms and legs, a frown characteristic of the intellectually deprived, tattoos on both forearms screaming of his inextinguishable love for Mother (left forearm) and Denise (on the right, in indigo, from elbow to wrist), and puncture marks in all major veins. On the bare wooden table in the equally bare interrogation room: two suitcases, open to show plastic-wrapped gray blocks about six inches by four. Ruamsantiah handed me a British passport: Charles Valentine Buckle. The sergeant explained that Buckle had been caught at his hotel in a combined police/customs operation after a tip-off, bang to rights.

  “Tell me if he’s as stupid as he looks,” Sergeant Ruamsantiah ordered me.

  “And if he is?”

  “Then we better start looking for Denise.”

  Ruamsantiah’s intuitive approach to law enforcement is famous throughout the station. I myself would have preferred a more thorough investigation, in which the stages of detection are more clearly defined, but his conclusion that this sack of testosterone:

  1. was too stupid to arrange for the purchase, transportation, and export of $500,000 worth of morphine on his own;

  2. must therefore be within the control of another person of superior intellect, who on the evidence of his tattoos and macho-slave posture was likely to be a woman;

  3. whose name, on the balance of probability,
was likely to be Denise,

  was hard to fault. I noted, with admiration, that the Denise tattoo was darker and fresher than the other, which virtually proved Ruamsantiah’s hypothesis. Indeed, the more I looked at him, the more convinced was I—as was Ruamsantiah—that he would not make a move without Denise. Yep, Denise done it.

  “His mobile?”

  Ruamsantiah took a rather outdated Siemens from a drawer under the table and handed it to me. With considerable pride I was able to locate both his telephone address book on the sim card and the list of numbers recently dialed and calls received. (You don’t work with whores without learning mobiles, farang.) There was a predominance of one particular number, which looked like another mobile. When I checked with the address book, I saw that it corresponded to the number under the single letter D. The Pink Coconut was watching me with increasing fury, which expressed itself in recurring bursts of sweat with which his face and shaved pate were covered, just as if he’d come in from a tropical storm. (There was a periodic seeping and an unpleasant odor characteristic of consumers of dairy products—you don’t get that sort of stink with lemongrass.)

  “D is for Denise, right?” I snapped.

  I did not, myself, consider this as evidence of forensic brilliance on my part, but Charles Buckle was clearly impressed. “Yeah.” Then he clammed his mouth shut in an odd kind of way, fearing he’d said too much.

  “Let’s see if she’s awake, shall we?”

  I used the autodial feature to call the number under D. Twelve rings before a British accent that had been dragged from the bottomless pit of sleep answered. “Chrissake Chaz, what the fuck d’you want now?”

  “Good morning,” I said. “This is the Royal Thai Police Force, and Chaz is going to jail for the rest of his life, assuming, that is, that he avoids the death penalty. We would like to ask you a few questions concerning—”