John Burdett - The Bangkok Asset

Inside the house, where the music is even louder, there are a half-dozen police from the local station standing around on the marble floor. They see me and jerk their chins at the double staircase. Then they point to their ears and shake their heads and look at me for answers. I shrug, but now I think I know what that music is. I climb up to the master bedroom. Krom is there in her black boiler suit, hands in her pockets. It looks as though she has finished issuing orders and is stumped for the moment. She nods when she sees me.

“I can’t figure out how to turn off that damned music. There must be hidden cables with an independent power source. We can’t just smash the speakers. Do you know what it is?”

“Yes,” I say, for I’ve remembered. I am no kind of classical music buff, but the memory goes back to Fritz, who was the first of my mother’s customers to become a full-fledged person to me, rather than mere food source. He loved the work of some crazy Renaissance prince called Gesualdo, told a story of a genius who murdered his wife and her lover then shut himself up in his castle where he had his servants whip him for the rest of his life. The off-key music he produced was a direct expression of his spiritual death, his private hell. Is the Asset finally saying something real here?

“It’s composed by an Italian murderer.”

“It’s so creepy.”

I raise my eyes. She jerks her chin toward the bathroom where the forensic team has finished with the video sweep and is now kneeling to take still photos of minute details that might or might not be useful. They’ve left Sakagorn where they found him, naked in the bath. I stare and stare.

The tableau is very famous, so famous I have come across it often in my endless travels through time and space on the Net. Now I realize who David is in this context. I open my smart phone, key in French Revolution, David, Marat, death of, and there they are: the picture on the phone and the still life, so to speak, in the bathroom. I show it to Krom. Her eyes flick from the miniature image of David’s masterpiece to the dead lawyer in the bath over and over again, perhaps as many as a dozen times.

“Amazing,” she murmurs. There is something quite strange in her tone, as if she is admiring a triumph of classified technology. “How he set him up like that…I don’t know. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.” She glances at me. “Murder as art? The final farang decadence?”

She is referring to the way the cadaver has been arranged to perfectly imitate the painting of the revolutionary Marat, with a few differences. For example, instead of a letter, Sakagorn is holding a barrister’s brief in his left hand. Instead of a cloth around his head the perp has wrapped his long hair up into a bun. Instead of an ink pot on a side stool, my half brother has wittily replaced it with an Apple laptop. But, as in the painting, one arm hangs out over the side of the bath, there is a light-colored towel with bloodstains under the armpit and a green towel also draped over the bath, and he is lurched to one side with his head almost resting on his right shoulder, his mouth slightly open and the fatal wound in his upper chest. As in the painting, the body has been dead just long enough to acquire a greenish tinge.

“Let’s go,” I say, and tell her about the Asset’s e-mail and the reference to Bully Boy Goldman.

There is a rear entrance to Sakagorn’s mansion, which we slip out of and hail a cab. I snatch glances of Krom from time to time as we race to Goldman’s apartment. I myself am still sufficiently human to be shocked by the lawyer’s death. I cannot say I liked him much or respected him, but it was not difficult to relate to his all-too-human weaknesses. Krom, though, I can tell, sees only a technical and cultural marvel in his murder and can hardly stop smirking. She has been enhanced, after all, she is no longer one of us. Now I watch carefully as she does that special thing with her mind. Krom closes her eyes and seems to retreat deeply into herself until the world is entirely blocked out. It takes only a few seconds, then, when she opens her eyes again she is a different person. There is a new, steely strength in the atmosphere around her and even a slightly metallic timbre to her voice.

“How many…I mean, how long before the revolution?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Good question. A lot depends on your half brother, actually.” She smiles. “Like any applied science, once it’s seen to work it can’t be stopped. That’s why I gave in-you can’t fight the future.”

“Which is what?”

“Exactly. That’s the question, isn’t it? Maybe a replay of the fifties when the world and Superman were young and no one in the USA had heard of Vietnam.”

The cab turns into the driveway of Goldman’s apartment building and our conversation ends.

–

Are you familiar with the work of the baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, R? I myself was not and had to fish out my iPhone again to consult the Wiki. It seems he was another Italian murderer, on the run from Rome with a price on his head, literally: anyone who brought his head in a basket to the Pope could expect to receive the reward immediately in gold. In an attempt to express penance by painting his way out of the fix, he did a David with the Head of Goliath in which he features not as the triumphant David but as the head in the basket. For this reason our Asset has given Goldman a false black beard and a long black wig. He must have shaved the head and used strong glue for the wig, because it is hanging by some strands from a bronze statue of-well, you guessed. Where he found a man-size copy of Michelangelo’s David in Bangkok I cannot say. In any event, he was unable to imitate the painting exactly and had to hang the head around David’s neck and so arranged the piece to face us immediately on our opening the front door to Goldman’s apartment. Beheadings are, of course, notorious for the mess they make. The floor is slick with blood pooling in hollows. It is still liquid, though. He must have done Goldman quite recently. Now my iPhone bleeps.

Let us go see our father together, Dear Brother, I would like that and I’m sure he would too. BTW as a professional I do hope you don’t find my work too fussy? I’m feeling just a touch of stage fright.

I show the message to Krom, whose eyes glitter. It must be the drugs she takes that give her a weakness for heroic madness. She shrugs. “Go, you can’t arrest him, he has diplomatic immunity, and anyway the Americans would never allow it, he knows that, he won’t hurt you.”

“But why murder the two people in the world who were closest to him?”

“Ask him when you see him.”

I sulked. I hate it that I cannot arrest the Asset; it disgusts me that some kind of elitism is already at work regarding transhumans. It enrages me that he can walk around free; this is Bangkok, not Baghdad. I tell you, R, you only have to come from a semifeudal society to develop an extreme aversion to a future where the whole planet will be under the heel of an aristocracy of Enhanced Ones. Take it from the third world: you really don’t want to go down that road, you’ve forgotten what it’s like, cast your mind back, why did your ancestors get on the Mayflower in the first place? Oh, never mind, I know it’s too late. Anyway, I have to see him, don’t I? I replied to his message with a taciturn OK.

In the meantime the results from the swab tests didn’t come. Instead I received a letter from the Trustee for the Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Kentucky who regretted that the Know the Father Corporation, now in receivership, was being investigated by the FBI, who suspected the KTF of fraud, money laundering, blackmail, conspiracy and intimidation within the meaning of the RICO provisions, and employment of unqualified personnel who posed as technicians: in brief, my swabs would not be processed, and it was unlikely I would get my money back.