John Burdett - The Bangkok Asset

“You saw it tonight. The way the Russians tried to discredit the Asset by making it look as if he is a child molester and killer-just what the Chinese are afraid of with this program. Polonium’s people even knew you are the Asset’s half brother and that you long to find your father-hence the writing on the mirror in a murder in the center of District 8.” She pauses. “But the point is the technology you witnessed. That will get everyone excited, including the Chinese when they are briefed. Nobody knew the Russians had gotten that far. You said one of the scientists thinks they’re further ahead with graphene technology than America? That’s going to get a lot of people’s attention. You see, masks turned out to be key. The human being in its evolution sacrificed almost everything to vanity. Soft beautiful skin instead of protective hair, large seductive and vulnerable eyes, muscles and tendons allowed almost to degenerate for the sake of producing shapely limbs, etcetera. You want to put primate intensity back into the mix, you have to sacrifice aesthetics-big time. This results in a product that is too ugly for anyone to look at; even hardened military men can’t stand to look at a full HZ without its mask on.” She scratches her ear. “Amazing, isn’t it, the one thing nobody thought of: beauty. It tripped them up big time. But graphene masks are the way to go. That’s why you had three world-class specialists there tonight. Some ass is going to get kicked in Virginia soon as they realize they’re so far behind Polonium. It’ll be the space race all over again.”

I grunt.

“What’s the matter, is all this too much for you?”

“I’m just a simple cop.”

She laughs cynically.

“But I am a cop and so are you, and I’m wondering why we’re conveniently ignoring the main point.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is how you know so damn much.”

She lets quite a few beats pass. “Didn’t I tell you I was recruited?” she says simply. Then adds, “Look, why don’t you come back, see how I live, we’ll talk some more?”

You work with someone, inevitably you build up a picture of the way they live. So: Krom is a single young dyke who lives in a bedsit somewhere between Ekkamai and On Nut, probably in a modern four-story walk-up on a side street, she is polite but strange with neighbors, she rarely entertains save for one-night stands that take place discreetly so as not to cause outrage; if she has a second bedroom, it is full of cardboard boxes of old clothes and outdated gadgets, on her wall hang posters originating in the lesbian blogosphere, there is a ruthless kind of masculinity in the minimalism, right? Wrong.

To judge from the direction we have taken in her old Toyota, it seems as if she resides in the most expensive part of town, between Ploenchit and Lumpini Park; but not all the land around here has been developed for tall apartment buildings. Throughout the city you still find die-hards, people who like to live in a wooden house on stilts in a generous orchard with plenty of plants, pools, cats and dogs, even monkeys and parrots, while the wall of high-rises rises higher and higher all around.

It is still dark when we arrived at the iron gates. Krom uses a remote handset to open and close them behind us. Safety lights make it possible to discern perhaps a half acre of land with a couple of fish pools, some banyan and frangipani trees, grass that is cut irregularly; a dozen cats’ eyes stare from improbable elevations when we get out of the car. Krom leads me up a wooden stairway and uses an old-style latchkey to enter the house, which is already inhabited and filled with light. Someone is not merely awake, someone is working at this hour.

“It’s late afternoon on the East Coast of America,” Krom explains. “You’ll see.”

We are standing in a corridor. By my calculation the room at the far end must run the width of the house and offer a fine view of the garden with the pools, trees, and cats. It must be like old Siam in that room. Krom leads me to the door, knocks gently: “Can we come in?”

“Come.”

The woman in the far room is tall for a Chinese; perhaps she owns Manchurian genes, for she is around five eleven and slim, about fifty years old in a comfortable silk housecoat, her black hair tied back in a bun. She leans lightly on a shelf next to her hand, holds her head at an angle, waits expectantly; but it is the shelf that now grabs my attention-actually, all the shelves do. The room is a library of perfume bottles, tens of thousands of them, which cram the shelves in colorful sets six deep, like a paperback library. Meanwhile, discreet and intriguing aromas play games with my head. It’s difficult not to feel a happy kind of high in this room, as if the aromas were proxies for love and money.

“I have brought a visitor,” Krom tells the Chinese woman.

“Yes,” she says, “I can smell him well enough from here.” She smiles. “Krom has told me all about you,” she says. Then, when the Chinese woman decides to move and continues to hold her head in a certain way with eyes apparently focused on the ceiling, I realize she is blind. “I’m afraid I have a call from New York in about two minutes,” she says and dips a hand in the pocket of her housecoat to pull out a smart phone to show us.

“I’m sorry,” Krom says. “Shall we leave you alone?”

“No, it’s only business,” she says. “What is your friend’s name again?”

“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Detective, this is Madame Gloria Ching-but I call her Yai, because she is almost my mother.”

“There’s no almost about motherhood,” Madame Ching says with a smile, still holding her head at an angle, her unfocused eyes pointing at the ceiling. “And Krom is way ahead of me in most things.”

“Except perfume,” Krom says.

“Yes. Perhaps.” Now her phone rings and she fishes it out of her pocket. “Hello, Gloria Ching speaking.” Her English is perfect, of the kind only taught in expensive Asian private schools.

“She’s the daughter of a PRC cadre,” Krom whispers. “Nothing but the best for her, especially since she was born sightless. Her father was on the Central Committee, he was a kind of minister of defense, but they purged him and he’s been under house arrest for two decades. He still has connections, though, and tons of dough offshore.”

“I’m afraid I’m not so keen, to be honest with you,” Madame Ching is saying to her caller in New York. “He needs to bite the bullet and put in some more skatole for the base notes…No, skatole is civet shit, more precisely, the smell of civet shit…But what it really needs, and I’m generously giving free advice here, is a touch of hyraceum…It’s made from the petrified excrement of the Cape hyrax. It has the power to make perfume intriguing instead of merely pleasant…You see, aroma is like any art, you don’t get anywhere without contrast and depth…I don’t mind the bergamot at all, I think he’s done a fine job with the bright floral theme, and the citrus is very well anchored, it’s just that it lacks intrigue, which is what you need for evening wear…Yes, I’ll talk to him or put it in writing if you like…Well, you want to sell to Asia, you have to do a lot of floral highlights, we’re not so dark and animal as the West, he’s got that right…I’ll have someone send a bill for the consultation before the end of the month…Goodbye.”

Madame Ching closes her phone and clicks in our direction. At first I was not sure I had heard right, or if the middle-aged woman had some eccentricity that caused her to make clicking sounds. It is clear she intends to join us in the sitting area at the other end of the room, and I assumed that Krom would guide her, or she would use a stick. Instead, she keeps up with the hollow-sounding clicks, then walks toward us with perfect assurance. She sits on a chair next to a sofa we are sitting on, smiles in my direction. Krom is staring at me, waiting for a reaction.