John Burdett - The Bangkok Asset

“Which is the real reason we find you in such unlikely locations like the river during the storm a few days ago-hardly an occasion for legal counseling, I would have thought?”

Sakagorn waved a hand. He was back on form now and too tough to show how shocked he was that I knew he was there on the river on that wild wet and dreadful day. “Goldman sometimes invites me on his jaunts. My brief is to find out as much about him as possible-so I go along. I hate it, I don’t really understand, and I hate it from my gut. But I’m a patriot, I do my duty.”

Sakagorn jerked his chin at me and asked Vikorn, “Does he understand? I’ve heard of him, some kind of monk manqué, they say. The only cop in Krung Thep who doesn’t take money.”

“True, but he takes orders. You can rely on us.”

We watched the Senior Counsel stand and leave the room.

Vikorn bit his lower lip. With Sakagorn gone, he knew I was looking to him for some kind of clue. He played with some controls until the big screen behind him showed the tropical band of the Pacific Rim. He reduced the scale until tiny Laos almost disappeared and it looked as if Thailand shared a border with the PRC. You could draw a vertical line north from Bangkok all the way through the center of China until you reached Mongolia. When he reduced the scale still further, though, the northern direction revealed another player of substance: Russia. He took us on a jaunt through the Taymyr Peninsular in Siberia all the way to the Arctic Ocean, then switched off, stood up, and left the room.

BTW, R, are you up to speed on the Higgs boson experiment? You know, all those guys who spent decades looking into the very depths of the universe and finally found the law of symmetry? If they’d asked a Buddhist like me I could have saved them the fourteen billion euros they spent on the Hadron Collider. Yep, the mind works by symmetry. When you think you are looking into the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, what you are really looking at is the way your own mind works, because that’s the only thing the mind can ever discover: itself. Bottom line: the cosmos is an expression of loving kindness; but even symmetry is subject to the law of symmetry. You can’t have it without its opposite: asymmetry. It’s the law of opposites, good for everything this side of cosmic consciousness.

Once you know the rule, you are no longer surprised by the antics of your head in its unending quest for a smooth ride and a free lunch. For example, here I am in the back of a cab and by all accounts I should be racking my brains about the Market Murder, the atrocity on the river, the tangled intentions of the CIA and the PRC, the huge new game changer of electronic surveillance, etcetera-when in its unending quest for symmetry my mind has counterbalanced into trivia: I am thinking about that thumb drive Inspector Krom gave me. It is still in my pants pocket.

It was clear from her body language that it was not something to check out on my computer at the station; I guessed it was a video of the more explicit kind: with a tattoo like that she had to be a closet exhibitionist. So I called Vikorn’s secretary, Manny, to tell her I was stuck in traffic, then told the driver to take me home to the hovel.

When we roll up outside I can see Chanya at her desk working on her computer. She glances through the window in reaction to the noise of the cab, sees me, and waves and returns to her work. It is her new big idea that Western feminism was long ago hijacked by market forces, low-rent journalists, crusader narcissism, and petty-bourgeois judgmentalism, not to mention an unhealthy obsession with clitorectomy as practiced by the Ashanti of South Ghana (I don’t know where she finds her Facebook buddies). She decided to found a website that really tells it like it is for Asian women. And that’s where her heart is, while I pull off my clothes and pull on a pair of shorts.

“You’re taking the day off?” she asks, barely hiding her irritation.

“Just a few hours.”

I need a strategy to get her to watch the video. Like many people who don’t have much to do, she is fiercely sensitive to any implication that she doesn’t have much to do. I think about rolling a joint but decide against it. I also think about that oil Krom gave me, and decide against that, too. I scratch my head and go to the window to think: What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve been beating myself up with that question for years, but every time is like the first beating all over again. Why is paranoia ever green?

“Ah, tilak, ” I venture. “Listen, I don’t want to interfere with your work, but I do have something relevant to show you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, your website is dedicated to those good, genuine, strong, independent women who are not eternal undergraduates with personality problems trying to make a name for themselves by endlessly bitching about men, right? The politically correct cannot stand very much reality.”

“That’s an oversimplification, but okay.”

“So, I’ve met someone you might be interested in. Someone very real in a weird kind of way.”

Silence.

“It’s okay, she’s a hundred percent gay-one of those left out by mainstream fem-” I stop to correct myself. “From mainstream everything, actually. She’s really from down your alley-I think. And she has a genius IQ.”

“So?”

I tell her about the video. “It’s okay,” I say. “No need to look at it straightaway, whenever you’re ready. I could leave it with you if you like.”

“Why, where are you going?”

“Well, nowhere.”

“So, we could watch it together, couldn’t we?”

“Sure, I just thought you were busy all day.”

She sighs, saves something she’s been writing, and gives me her full attention. “Okay, let’s watch the fucking video. You’ve got me all excited now.”

“Sure,” I say, “sure,” and take out the thumb drive.

–

Chanya was intrigued. Lesbianism was only beginning to gain general acceptance in Bangkok when she was in her early twenties. It has taken off quite a bit since then, but she felt part of an earlier generation who didn’t really get it. For her, from the start, the mystery, the challenge, the game of life was all about men. She frowned as the video started on her screen. It was obvious, though, that it was mostly song-and-dance, which needed the sound system. Chanya plugged in our rickety old speakers and suddenly the small room seemed to disintegrate under the pressure of that form of rock music called punk, indie, or alternative -unless you don’t like it, in which case it’s just plain bedlam. Krom stood center stage wearing her full police inspector uniform, waiting.

I almost never look at YouTube, never check out all those clever amateur video clips that go viral all over the global village and have already been forgotten by the time someone like me thinks about looking at them. So it was a surprise, even a shock, to see how professional the tom ’s video was.

The scene was some kind of basement. It was less than minimalist: the plaster on the walls was missing in many places, revealing brickwork and reinforced concrete; a large number of luridly colored water pipes emerged from one wall and disappeared into another. There was no stage, but the bare, crumbling wall behind her was effectively the top of the room. She had chosen an old-style microphone so she could use the stand as a prop, but she had a Bluetooth receiver in her ear. The microphone and the Bluetooth receiver already turned her cop uniform into a kind of pantomime costume. At a nod from her the music started. It was something extreme and heavy-I’m afraid I lost track of the counterculture long ago. Now we saw it was a strip video.