Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Did you ever see one?” Chompu asked.

Mayuri was sitting next to him and she leaned close and cupped her hand around her mouth as if she were about to impart a deep secret.

“Not only did I see one,” she whispered aloud, “I rode in one. That’s why it was so awesome when I saw it in the newspaper.”

She had my undivided attention. There weren’t that many VW Kombis around.

“When was that?” I asked.

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” she said.

She’d hammered the year. Put herself right there.

“How old were you then?” Chompu asked.

“Twenty…what? Twenty-two?”

“How did you get to ride in a VW Kombi?” I asked.

She tutted and sipped her Coke.

“The things you do,” she said. “The things you do when you’re young.” She looked around at us all staring at her and decided it was probably no big deal to go on. “The seventies were crazy,” she said. “This army coup and commies everywhere, and government spies, everyone suspicious and blaming each other. It was a really hard time to grow up and, you know, believe anything. Some of us headed down to the beaches where the backpackers were. We had these wild times down there. We met this crazy Thai guy who’d been living in the jungle hiding out from the junta, and he had this family land outside Surat. He asked us to live with him there. There was like a group of us. We thought we were flower children but I think we’d been just pretend hippies till he came along. This Thai guy gave us a chance to live a real alternative lifestyle, you know? We set up this, what do you call it? This cooperative farm. He’d lived on something similar in the States, he said. We were trying to do it all without money. We grew most of what we needed, raised animals, cut wood for cooking, you know? It was this very simple, like, beautiful life.

“But there were needs, you see? The bigger our commune got, the more we needed — petrol for the pumps, you know, a truck, a little tractor — but we weren’t making anything from the stuff we produced. We were just, you know, surviving. And we needed money. I guess, when I think about it now, that means we weren’t very good at being self-sufficient. The whole point was that we…Anyway, I had this father, of sorts. I hadn’t spoken to him for years but I got in touch and asked him if he could let me have some money. He wasn’t into it but he said he had a few odd jobs he could let us do to earn some bread. He told me about this car rental deal. He’d front the rental money and arrange IDs. Two of us would hire a rental car, drive it to this friend of my father up the coast, and leave it there. His friend would take it to Hua Hin and sub-rent it to foreigners at three times the price. Then he’d drive it back.”

“What makes you think that’s what they did?” Granddad Jah asked.

“What else would they do with them?” she asked.

“Steal them.”

“Ooh, do you think so? That sounds a lot more dishonest than just borrowing, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t think it odd that they didn’t have you drive them back to the rental firm?”

“Right. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Right,” I said. “And how long were you and your friends involved in this rental scam?”

“I don’t know. Three months? About that. It was a nice easy income. And we didn’t see it as illegal, you see? Just sharing rich people’s wealth around. That was our philosophy, our mantra.”

“Rob from the rich and give to yourselves?” said Granddad Jah.

Mayuri missed the point.

“We’d have nice cars to drive, look at the scenery, take our time and come back on the bus. And we had money for the commune.”

“So, how did the VWs change things?” Chompu asked.

Two of our seven ordered dishes arrived on the table. We didn’t know whether to tuck in or wait for the rest. Mayuri solved the dilemma by dipping a spoon into the prawn fried rice and ladling a good helping onto her plate.

“There were two or three couples renting cars, I remember,” she said. “They were mostly, you know, Fords and Austins, that kind of thing. Nice cars but nothing exciting. Then we were told to go to this company and they had two VW Kombis. They were, like, these chariots of the flower gods. We were awestruck. Dad wanted sedans but we couldn’t resist it. We rented one of the two VWs. It was a gas. We were so close to heaven we lost it.”

“The van?”

“Our minds. We’d wanted that life. That VW nirvana. Once we were driving around in a Kombi it was better than drugs.”

“Which you also had,” I threw in.

“Mostly ganja. We grew it in the hills around the commune. It was a sin, of course. But so was beer and swatting flies so we ignored that. Religion was one of those strangling, you know, doctrines we were anti at the time. So we all traveled with a stash of dope for the journey. We found somewhere secure to hide it ‘cause the cops were even more Bolshevik then than they are now.”

“That’s nice to hear,” said Chompu.

“My soul partner then, his name was Wee, beautiful man. He said we shouldn’t take the van straight up to the dealer guy. He said we should enjoy it a little bit.”

“So you didn’t make it to Chumphon?” I asked.

She giggled and I saw traces of the wild girl in her eyes. My mother had those same remnants of devil.

“We didn’t even make it out of the province,” she said. “We were picked up by the highway police the next morning and packed off to the Chaiya police station.”

“What for?” I asked. This and the account of the Surat detective, Captain Waew, were beginning to merge.

“Oh, you know. The supernatural magic of the Kombi. We’d driven around, had a little toke. Drove some more, had a little toke. Next thing you know we’re heading back into Surat. Going completely the wrong direction. So we found a pretty nature spot and bunked down for the night.”

“The police found you naked and stoned in the back of the van,” said Granddad Jah. “You weren’t twenty meters from the highway.”

“We were crazy, uncle. Like I say.”

She giggled again and shoveled in some rice; she seemed energized from the memories. Her past was obviously a lot more fun than her present.

“What happened then?” Chompu asked.

“We were using fake IDs. We knew it wouldn’t be long before the cops got wise to that, then tied us to the other cars we’d rented. We didn’t want to get in trouble. Then this inspector came from Surat and, like, told us he was investigating my dad — except he didn’t know he was my dad — and that we could do a deal. He said he’d keep us out of jail if we gave evidence against the old man. Of course, anything’s better than being in jail, right? So we agreed.”

“To give evidence against your own father?” Granddad Jah asked.

“Yeah. We weren’t that close. I don’t know. We might not have gone through with it if he’d helped get us out, but he just went quiet. Pretended he didn’t know us. I was afraid he was going to let us burn. You know? He was like that. But, anyway, while we were thinking about it, they put us up in this nice little locked-up house with a fridge and a TV. The detective said it was to keep us safe but there wasn’t any way to get out. There was this fat constable there at the gate watching over us. It was cool. We were just hanging out, watching TV. It was all so surreal. Then Dad showed up.”

“And he helped you stage the kidnapping?” I said.

“Yeah. It wasn’t that hard ‘cause the constable had vanished and left the doors unlocked. Weird, that.”

The last of our food order arrived, passing our hopes on the way which were heading at speed out of the window. The bodies in the VW were obviously not this couple.