Тимоти Холлинен - Bangkok Noir

Om comes (she says) from a very small village on the Cambodian border where everyone is tattooed and speaks Khmer as a first language. Her tattoos are in an ancient Khmer script and, I do believe, are faithful reproductions of still more ancient Hindu spells and magical incantations that can be traced back to the Arians and the Vedas . When I first slept with her she watched the expression on my face when I found the tattoo on her upper left thigh about two centimeters from the entrance to her vagina. I still have no idea what it says and I don’t know why I gulped when I saw it. How can a single syllable in an alien script make anyone gulp? It had an effect though. After the first time I saw it, I became very horny — outrageously so for a man of my age. Since then the tattoos have increased. At the time of writing she owns another at the small of her back, one on her left shoulder and one more about half an inch below her navel. So far as I know they are all ancient Khmer script and represent Bronze Age Brahmin magic.

There’s another curious thing about Om: she loves the shrine to Mae Nak not far from On Nut Skytrain station on the Phrakanong canal. I can’t remember how many times I’ve gone there with her. She always buys candles and incense and spends about fifteen minutes in profound meditation whenever she visits. You know the story of Mae Nak of course? That brave and noble Thai wife for whom death was no obstacle: she continued to take great care of her husband and family even as a ghost. For my money Mae Nak deserves the title as patron saint of Bangkok, considering how popular she is; there’s always a crowd of women at her shrine when Om and I visit. Everyone remembers the punch line: one day while the ghost Mae Nak was preparing nam phrik in front of her husband on the floor of their wood house, she dropped a lime through a gap in the floor boards. The lime landed in the cellar below and, without a thought, Mae Nak effortlessly extended her arm to a length of twenty feet to retrieve it. Her flesh-and-blood husband saw, realised he’d been living with a ghost and freaked.

Okay, I’m going to make a confession here: on the morning of the day Om and I first made love together Om took me to Mae Nak’s shrine and as we were both kneeling she took my left hand and pressed it on her upper left thigh. I wondered what she was doing; then, later that day, when I saw her naked I realised she had pressed my hand on her tattoo. I bought her condo a week later, because I knew even at that stage I could not survive without her.

Now, so far nothing I’ve related can be said to be totally out of the ordinary; a little eccentric, perhaps, with plenty of Oriental exoticum, but nothing to which you wouldn’t lend credence, right? So here’s the stretcher: last Friday afternoon when I visited I saw she had been busy redecorating the condo. Well, maybe redecorating is an extravagant word for the half hour she must have spent with a felt tip pen and a spray gun. They were everywhere. What were? The tattoos , of course. The one on her thigh was reproduced above the front door and again on the bedroom door. The others, those on her back, shoulder and belly, appeared in either black or red at various places all over the flat. Then there were the sculptures: carefully carved and polished pieces of blackwood all about twelve inches in length, all on wrought iron stands, all highly artistic three-dimensional reproductions of the tattoo on her thigh, placed at strategic positions near doors and windows.

Yes, I was taken aback, but not overly so. If she had been practicing black magic on me, I was pretty satisfied with the result so far — I don’t want to sound mean spirited, but compared with the sex life I’d had at home for the past decades... So I made no objection and even confessed that simply seeing that single ancient Khmer syllable (whatever it meant) in black over the front door was giving me a hard-on. But the magical inscriptions were only a tiny part of the shock to my sense of reality that day. Instead of taking me straight to the bedroom, as she usually did, Om gave me a special excited smile and showed me where she’d reached in Uncle Walter’s diary, which she was reading on her laptop. She had taken the trouble of inserting an electronic book mark, so that as soon as she had started Word, we were taken to a paragraph in Walter’s diary which read:

Spent all day yesterday at Mae Nak’s temple at On Nut, right on the Phrakanong canal. I don’t know what it is about that myth that grabs me. Hallucinations all night, and I haven’t smoked a thing. The sorcery is so strong, the whole stretch by the canal, with the flowers, lotus buds, incense sticks and the statue, radiates power. I know Thai women feel it, however vaguely, that’s why there’s always such a crowd.

Now, the problem was that such a passage did not appear in Walter’s diary, although it is a pretty good imitation of his style. I ought to have known, for at certain times in my life I’d spent whole years reading him, I knew his masterpiece by heart, and such a passage did not appear in it . Rather than argue with her, or allow myself to be distracted in any other way from the jolt to the crotch that her redecoration had delivered the moment I entered the flat, I simply shook my head and forced a smile. After all, I had only to return to my office later to check with the handwritten original, which I kept in the safe there.

Om’s magic worked even better than usual that day: five times, squeezed into the couple of hours I’d allowed myself for lunch. Naturally, as soon as I’d showered and kissed my amour goodbye, I rushed back to the office to retrieve Walter’s script. It is in the form of school exercise books of various gaudy colours, more than one hundred in all. I knew, 10 Gone East roughly, the dates when he was in Bangkok, so it was not difficult to find the book, and then the page, which Om had been reading on her laptop. Now the green balls really started to run down my legs: this is what I found in Walter’s inimitable spidery script:

Spent all day yesterday at Mae Nak’s temple at On Nut, right on the Phrakanong canal. I don’t know what it is about that myth that grabs me. Hallucinations all night, and I haven’t smoked a thing. The sorcery is so strong, the whole stretch by the canal, with the flowers, lotus buds, incense sticks and the statue, radiates power. I know Thai women feel it, however vaguely, that’s why there’s always such a crowd.

A cold sweat broke out all over my body. I knew, for certain, that passage had not been in the original. But I was looking at the original, and there it was. No question but that the safe was inviolable: a floor-to-ceiling Chubb with high tech extras, it was ridiculous to think Om or anyone working for her could have broken into it. Anyway, there was no sign the script had been tampered with, and only a counterfeiter of genius could have forged Walter’s handwriting and even then how would they have inserted such a paragraph in an old traveler’s journal where every last space was used up?

I was scared. Very very scared.

Fear was not my only reaction, however. I was also thrilled, intrigued, fascinated — and it would be coy not to admit to a certain hope that something inexplicable to law and science was happening to me. I was not wrong. No sooner had I put Walter’s journal back in the Chubb and locked it, than my first secretary came into my room to say that a new client was waiting to see me. This also was anomalous. All my clients came through my wife’s family connections and always made contact with my second secretary, who did nothing except network with my in-laws. My first secretary was trained in law and was brilliant at all she did but could not network to save her life. When I exchanged a glance with her she shrugged and jerked a chin at the waiting area. I nodded. She left the room to return a few seconds later with a tall, slim, wiry Southeast Asian man in his sixties with long gray hair in a pony tail, a wispy gray beard and piercing eyes. I understood immediately that he was a type one comes across from time to time in Asia: somehow, perhaps through some mystic or martial discipline, he had retained an undeniable vigor, as if the virility of youth still empowered his hard body. When I offered him a chair, he shook his head. Instead he came up to the desk, looked down to study me with intense curiosity for a moment, then said in Thai with a thick Khmer accent: “Your wife is dying. Go home now.”