Bangkok Tattoo sj-2 Read online

  But they pass by us just as Ishy removes his shirt, then the rest of his clothes.

  "The yakuza are very humane," he explains while the surgeon takes a syringe out of his pocket and a small vial out of another. He pulls the hygienic paper off the syringe, pulls the protective cap off the needle, and plunges the needle into the vial. "They said I could die first. I said no, I want to preside over the removal of my masterpiece. One wrong move by that wop, and I'll curse him for eternity." Shaking his head at Chanya: "Don't worry, love-it'll pay for everything. There's nothing more to worry about. This way you get to keep your tits." He pauses while one of his countrymen ties a white scarf with black Japanese characters around his head in the tradition of kamikaze, then watches while the surgeon injects him in the arm: "It's one of those new brain drugs. I'll be able to follow everything painlessly, like a great fog of consciousness looking down on my exfoliation. I see this as a personal triumph-like the snake I am, I'm shedding my skin, my ego, and my life in praise of Buddha and for the love of man. After all I've been through, I think that's heroic. You may not want to witness this, though. You're free to go. I told them you won't tell anyone."

  I tell Chanya to get the hell out while she still can, even though these men seem to pose no threat to her and indeed have more or less ignored her since they cut their deal. Am I protecting her, or is there some other motive? Perhaps I'm ashamed of my morbid curiosity. Perhaps I don't want her to see how fascinated I am by what will happen next. (Maybe I don't want to see how fascinated she might be.) I take her to the door, kiss her, and push her away. By the time I have returned, the drug is already taking effect-Ishy is losing control of his legs. The surgeon barks orders in Japanese, and five men immediately surround the artist and lower him gently onto the long table. Already he has lost all control over his body, there is no connection between his mind and his nerves, but light remains in those unblinking eyes. I would love to know what he's thinking.

  Under the direction of the Italian, the surgeon makes some deft strokes with a scalpel from armpits to hips and along the length of the underarms. He makes light circular incisions at the ankles and wrists and along the length of the penis. With quite astonishing speed, assisted by the Italian and one other man, they unpeel him. As with any masterpiece, the Italian carefully rolls up the hide to take it upstairs for curing. All the others follow, leaving me alone in the cavernous room with his brilliantly colored work glowing from the walls, while Ishy, finally naked, presides inscrutably over his own slow dying.

  SEVEN

  Plan C

  47

  W ell, we've received the final official lab results," Elizabeth Hatch says in that level, hypercontrolled way of hers. Nevertheless, she casts a slightly sheepish glance at me. (I have my spies: I heard on the grapevine she went on another tour last night and ended up with the same girl. This could be love-I have a feeling she'll be back.) "It seems the DNA is identical in the Stephen Bright and the Mitch Turner case. The only problem: the DNA, according to our database, belongs to the terrorist Achmad Yona, who was killed in the bomb blast in Samalanga in Indonesia a few weeks before Bright."

  "So he killed Mitch Turner, died in the bomb blast, came back to kill Stephen," Hudson says.

  I'm not totally convinced of an ironic intention. The conversation, in the CIA's suite at the Sheraton, possesses the surreal quality of a rehearsal. These two officers will be filing their own individual reports, of course; this is a practice session.

  "So you narrow down the possibilities. One, Achmad Yona had nothing to do with any of the slayings. He distributed hair from his beard and two of his fingers to colleagues in order to create a red herring and/or to enhance his reputation. Two, Yona did both killings and the DNA evidence found at the Indonesian bomb blast was a plant."

  "The way to handle it," Hudson declares, straightening his back (he has miraculously mutated into Paper Warrior First Class), "is to play down the Indonesia thing. So they found DNA belonging to him in that bomb blast-so what? They burned all the other remains before we could get to them, so we don't know for sure what they actually found, if anything. We can't rely on the Indonesians to play totally straight with us. They're Muslim, after all-under the skin they're not totally unsympathetic to the radical cause."

  "That's it," agrees Elizabeth. "We finesse the Indonesia thing into a footnote."

  "That's the way to play it," from Hudson.

  The two suddenly remember my presence. "Oh, we brought you over here because we wanted to make sure we're all singing from the same hymnbook." Elizabeth smiles. "Anything we've said so far inconsistent with your understanding of what went on?"

  Tired of lying for Vikorn and suddenly haunted by an image of Mustafa and his father, I experience a reckless, liberating, and profoundly Buddhist compulsion to tell the truth. "Actually, Mitch Turner and Stephen Bright were killed by a mad Japanese, a tattooist with a terrible personality problem who confessed before he died. The killings had nothing to do with Al Qaeda."

  I am more than a little curious at the effect this bombshell will have on these two professionals. Which only goes to show I'm not so smart; I should have remembered that farang inhabit a parallel universe. The two suffer from a moment of collective deafness. Or are they embarrassed? Third-world cops do come out with the most ridiculous crap after all.

  "Well, that's great," says Elizabeth after a long moment when no one looks me in the eye. "We can report that local law enforcement agrees with our initial report." She gives me one of her superior-librarian looks as I make for the exit. "I know his Colonel sees it our way, too."

  When I glance back from the door, Hudson mouths an apologetic explanation: "GS Eleven."

  The Sheraton is only a short walk from our primitive love nest. We should probably have moved out by now, Chanya and I, but we've both got used to being what we really are: a couple of third-world peasants grabbing a sweet moment, favoring quality of life above standard of living. We're both particularly fond of the big water trough in the backyard, where we wash each other down like elephants. She has to cook in the yard, too, and I've become fond of watching her pounding chiles with the mortar and pestle wearing nothing but a sarong. A couple of beers, the odd spliff, the sounds of the street at night while we cuddle up under the fan-what more could a sane man want?

  Well, there is just one gigantic loose end that troubles me. I wait for the moment-we've just made love, and Chanya, who has morphed into traditional Thai wife, goes to bring the beer from the cooler. I clear my throat. She glances at me. I'm tilting my head in the cutest possible imitation of a question mark. She's way too smart not to get the point. She puts the bottle down next to my arm, goes to rummage in one of her bags that she dumped in a corner of the room, and returns with a late-model IBM ThinkPad. My eyes turn to saucers while she expertly switches it on, connects the modem to our landline, and types in a code.

  In a sweet tone: "What is your question, exactly?"

  I stare at the screen while Windows XP Edition radiates its deep blue glow and those stupid Windows icons spread like a virus. "Vikorn. Why exactly was he so keen to protect you after Mitch's death? I've never seen him like that before. He even flew to Indonesia. Did you sleep with him?"

  She scowls. "Of course not. He was just terrified that if the CIA interrogated me, I'd spill the beans and Zinna would have him run out of town."

  "How did you get this?" I tap the IBM.

  "Mitch checked it into a safe box in the hotel he was staying at when Ishy killed him. I took the key when I left the room because I knew he would have some opium in the safe box. I took the ThinkPad at the same time."

  "You better tell me what really happened, just in case there's something I need to finesse with the CIA."

  "Sure," she says as she works the keys. Now we're out of Windows, into a dire warning of how the U.S. government will systematically hunt down and wreck the lives of anyone and everyone entering this supersecret database without authority.

  "It go
es like this," Chanya says.

  The scene is Mitch's apartment in Songai Kolok in the early days, quite some time before Ishy arrived to complicate their lives, the time of day about three in the afternoon. After watching Mitch slip into opium heaven-much to her relief, since he had been particularly tense on this visit-Chanya had pottered contentedly around. No doubt about it, there was something rather special about their relationship, particularly when the White Tornado was deeply opiated. He was stark naked on the bed, and she liked to have his amazing body in the best perspective. Once, wickedly, she placed a cotton towel over his head and imagined what his face would have been like if it had mirrored the beauty of his body. She found a tiny American flag in one of his drawers and stuck it in his hand, spending some time on getting the fist to clench. Out of curiosity she tried working his penis; the erectile tissue was off chasing dragons.

  Growing bored after a while, though, and allowing that she wouldn't have minded if he'd said a word or two, or even simply moved a finger, she wandered into the room he used as an office. He had been particularly voracious for his opium that day when she had arrived, and smoked a pipe as soon as she had handed him the black viscous package. In his haste he had forgotten to turn off his laptop, the screen of which was now swimming with a particularly banal screen saver. A mere jog of the mouse, though, took her directly into the much-vaunted secret world, for he had forgotten to turn off his Internet connection, too.

  Which turned out to be as boring as the screen saver. An apparently mindless chatter of international gossip came through on the incessant e-mail: American woman almost raped in Durbar Square in Kathmandu; gang of teenage American cannabis traffickers caught in Singapore; China cracking down on American businessman because he was making too much profit, now accused of being a spy (actually he was spying, the e-mail confided), State Department outrage recommended. Tip-off for the DEA: big shipment of heroin believed to be moving out of the Golden Triangle, down to Udon Thani. Obviously headed for Bangkok.

  Interested now, she traced the sequence of messages back through time. Relay teams of CIA, FBI, DEA, Thai customs, and Thai drug enforcement police were chuckling while they secretly followed the shipment from northern Laos, across the border into Thailand; like a snowball it collected more perps the more it rolled. The plan was to wait until it reached Bangkok, so the kingpin would be revealed. As she watched, they lost the shipment, however. Somehow on the outskirts of Krung Thep the van, surreptitiously followed by a great motorcade (of Japanese four-by-fours, so beloved of foreign government agencies), disappeared. Sighs, groans, and moans over the instant messaging. The Americans suspected the Thais of pulling a fast one. So did most of the Thais, who salivated at the probable size of the bribe someone had extorted.

  "We think it's General Zinna again," one of the real-time dialogues revealed.

  "Really?"

  "Yeah really."

  "You really think it was him?"

  "Yeah, that's what I think, that it was him, yeah."

  "Well, you don't know it was him?"

  "No, I don't."

  "It could have been someone else."

  "Yes, it could. But it wasn't."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I don't know that. I just know it."

  "Like a hunch or something?"

  "Like a hunch, but not really a hunch. A kind of-"

  "What?"

  "A kind of faux hunch."

  "What's a faux hunch?"

  "Like a hunch but it's not? I get them from time to time."

  "I've never heard of a faux hunch before. I have a conceptual problem with that."

  "I understand that."

  "But cutting to the chase, you've got one now?"

  "Yeah. Right now. That it was him, yes."

  "Zinna?"

  "Yeah. Zinna."

  "I'm bored out of my friggin' mind. You?"

  "If I wasn't, like, catatonic with boredom I wouldn't be talking to you like this. You're my last link with humanity. It's like, I'm that spaceship captain in that David Bowie song from way back? Thousands of years ago they launched me into cyberspace, and this is all I've known-if it wasn't for this dim, tenuous link with you, I'd be like a cipher by now-a shade. I guess that's all I am. I'm like those Japanese kids who can only communicate via computers."

  "You need to get laid."

  "Or smoke some dope."

  "Yeah. That's kind of funny."

  Chanya saw an intermittent cure for boredom in the future: there was something homely and warm about this faceless American conversation-it reminded her of those people in the States who had been good to her. It so happened that Mitch was slowly coming out of his trance, although still a long way from sobriety. He glanced up at her as she entered the bedroom, but his eyes immediately switched back to the ceiling. "Marge, I saw it, Marge."

  Chanya, doing her very best Marge Simpson impersonation: "Saw what, Homer?"

  Ecstatically: "I saw the beginning of the world, Marge."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah." Crestfallen: "Then I saw the end of it."

  "Did the Company send messages again?"

  "Yeah. That's how I saw the beginning and the end of the world, Marge. The Company knows everything."

  "Homer, honey, remind me again of the secret code for accessing encrypted messages from the Company over the Net."

  "AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783."

  48

  A fter Chanya left him that day, she thought about the heroin shipment that had disappeared, and Zinna. In no time at all, she fashioned a plan. She bought a large calculator that coped with more than twenty digits on the screen, but it didn't come close to telling her how dramatically her karma was about to be improved.

  Not enough zeros in the world. Chanya going to the stars this time.

  She could hardly believe the brilliance of her idea, or the great waves of relief that were rolling over her. She felt cleansed already, and during the journey she experienced repeated pleasurable shudders, the very shudders that the books associate with the first true experience of samadhi-your mind just cannot comprehend the relief: at first it has enormous difficulty admitting that life, finally, is an ecstatic experience, contrary to all news reports so far received.

  She covered her mouth to stifle laughs of joy, kept grinning inappropriately, and sometimes could not resist a sob. This was salvation, big-time. This was exactly what the Buddha taught: you acted with total selflessness, even putting your life on the line, certain that you were following the Path exactly as it presented itself to you in the context of your karma, grabbing at opportunities to liberate all living beings from the chains of existence. She understood that famous Buddha anecdote as if it were happening to her right now: wild strawberries had never tasted so good. She offered a vow that even though she was not yet a nun, she would continue, lifetime after lifetime, to the very end of time, to return to help and heal. Especially to heal. Like Joan of Arc she was a girl suddenly certain of her link with Up There. The only problem: finding the right jao por to whom to sell her plan.

  As often happens, though, with grandiose plots to dramatically improve one's karma, the idea soon began to diminish in her mind. She wondered if she had not spent too much time alone with that madman Mitch: how could an insignificant girl, a whore, hope to pull off something like that?

  Her devastation at the manner of his death, though, caused a seismic shift in her state of mind. She and Mitch had already been naked, about to make love, when Ishy burst in with that huge military knife, his face distorted with an insane jealousy. It happened so quickly. She was still lying next to the American when Ishy jumped him, plunged the knife into his guts, tore upward with the blade, then made her watch while he severed the penis, held it in her face, then chucked it on the bedside table. Ishy the artist had been totally eclipsed by Ishy the monster. There was even a righteousness in the tattooist's rage: a face bursting with self
-justification as he held up the severed member. Here was a tortured mind that had given up the last shred of resistance to its demon. Here indeed was the demon in purest form. Her face expressed total revulsion: she was not afraid to die. Clearly Ishy had misunderstood. For her, this could never be an expression of love. Further enraged, he grabbed the telephone and stretched the cable until it was close enough for her to use. Go on then, call the cops, his expression said.

  But she turned her face away. She dared not; her humiliation was complete. She would have let Ishy kill her without complaint, but the thought of spending the rest of her life in a Thai jail was more than she could face. (She was a whore and Ishy's former lover, of course the cops would charge her too.)

  With an expression of contempt, Ishy turned the American over and began expertly to remove his tattoo using the knife. Next to her on the bed, Mitch gave his last groans: she watched the light fade from his eyes, which fixed on her in eternal sadness.

  Ishy's face was a hideous caricature, like something from Japanese demonology, as he carefully rolled up the tattoo with both hands and placed it in a plastic bag that he dumped on the table. He picked up the knife again, held up her left breast for inspection, and traced the outline of the dolphin with the tip of the blade-then abruptly chucked the knife on the bed and left.

  Shock set in, spasms invaded her body. She forced herself from the bed, staggered around the room like a drunk until she found Mitch's pipe and smoked some of the opium before she could control herself sufficiently to leave. Tripping a little on the drug (entering the smoker's world of symbols), she picked up the rose she had discarded on entering the room, put it in a plastic beaker that she filled with water from the bathroom, and placed the beaker at the opposite end of the bedside table to that where the penis lay. Somehow these two icons now balanced each other.