Bangkok Haunts

I’m doing my best to reproduce his complex accent with its Cockney and transatlantic references, complete with lump in the throat, in an octave lower than that in which I am accustomed to express myself:
“Don’t worry about that. There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?”
    He has leaned back a little in his executive chair, contemplatively, and managed to close his mouth. I’m at the end of my rope and quite incapable of Buddhist patience. With astonishing irrelevance I pick up a cube of sugar that lies in the saucer of a coffee cup on his desk. “You do not take sugar? Too fattening, I suppose.” I crumple the sugar in my hand, then toss it over him. “Heroin,” I say in a loud voice. “I have caught you red-handed.” He does not react, confirming my earlier surmise that he is enjoying protection now. He brushes off the sugar with a go-fuck-yourself leer. I walk around his desk to stand above him.
    Scratching my head: “So I ask myself, how could Smith be connected to a video he has never seen that records an assassination he could not possibly have participated in because he was in another country at the time? And yet everything in my third-world-cop instinct tells me that this Smith knows something about the case, is involved in some way.” I turn my head to one side and smile. “Of course, it took me a while to work it out. After all, corporate law is not exactly my field. Oh yes, for a very long time I wondered how you fit in, Mr. Smith. Until I remembered that your training is indeed in corporate law. How many corporations are you on the board of? In how many land transactions throughout the length and breadth of the country are you a shadow shareholder? How often have you enabled
farang
to get around our protectionist land laws in order to profit by redevelopment? And I saw it, the perfect revenge for a lawyer driven quite insane by his lover: shareholder in the enterprise. That’s what I think you are. She had wounded you more than any woman you ever met. Others merely scratch—she stole bone marrow. You were incomplete until the day she died. How smart you must have thought yourself, reaping perhaps a tenfold, even hundredfold profit from the planned, digitally recorded execution of the demon who laughed as she chewed your guts. What an elegant ending.”
    I am making a question mark with my eyebrows, which he seems to find slightly comic. It is a good moment to kick his chair, which I do with maximum force. He virtually flies across the floor until he reaches the wall. It looks for a moment as if he will be able to keep his balance and his dignity, but the wheels on the thing are so efficient, they fail to provide stability, and he ends up on the floor with his head rammed uncomfortably against the wall. I walk over to stand on his left arm. He is in pain, but not enough. “I have protection,” he mutters. “You’re such a pure little fuck-up, I had to go higher.”
    “Who to? Vikorn?”
    A leer. “Higher. You don’t know who I’m connected to.”
    I smile. It may not sound like it, but this surely is a confession of guilt of a sort.
    He tries to pull his arm free from my foot but is unable to. I add to his difficulties with my other foot, then squat beside him, placing all my weight on his arm. “If that is your answer, Mr. Smith, then I’m afraid you are out of luck. I’m not working for the Royal Thai Police today. I’m moonlighting for the Buddha.” He blinks. “You’re looking a little yellow around the gills these days, Tom. I hope you haven’t been sleeping with ghosts?”
    He grunts in astonishment, and the mask falls. It occurs to me that he could easily overpower me; it is the promise of narrative, the carrot of closure that keeps him prone. “Let me tell you how she comes to you—every night, if I’m not wrong. You experience her first as a kind of erotic stirring, but since you are asleep, the stirring is more an overwhelming feeling of lascivious anticipation, a certainty that the final, ultimate coupling is about to free you from the misery of eternal isolation. Then she appears, glowing, wearing whatever garment you find most erotic—in my case it’s a low-cut black ballgown with nothing underneath, but then I’m corny like that. What’s amazing is her control over your body. She is capable of working your dick by remote, just by the power of transferred thought. You are her slave—she doesn’t stop working you until you’ve climaxed at