Bangkok Haunts

with pity.
    “Khun Baker,” I say as I step into his apartment, “so sorry to bother you again.” I stop short. What with nattering to Lek and all, I’ve not yet focused on his face. Now I see he is crumbling with terror. I stare at him and fish out a copy of the same photograph I gave to Smith. “I guess you’ve seen this already?” He looks at it, gulps, and stares at me.
    “Well,” I say, “if you talk, I’ll see what I can do.”
    Instead of replying, he directs my attention to the camera he has mounted on a tripod by the window. It is generously endowed with a huge zoom lens, which I suppose is the point. I go to it to look through the viewer. It is directed at the gate to his compound, where two of the new guards are sitting playing checkers with bottle tops. Even at leisure the impression is of bored souls waiting for a little slaughter to cheer them up.
    “They’re ex-KR,” he says hoarsely. “They don’t speak a word of Thai. Is this anything to do with you?”
    “No, but I can understand your fear.”
    “You’ve got to help me.”
    “You’ve got to talk.”
    It seems he can hardly master his mind long enough to put a decent confession together. I decide to help.
    “The problem, as always in any great criminal endeavor, was how to bind the loyalty of certain minor players who needed to be recruited for specialist services. The stud was easy enough—he owed money to loan sharks all over L.A., he didn’t have a future unless he could get hold of a big piece of money, and anyway he stars in the movie and is therefore incriminated. But what of the technical side? The flick is very well produced by someone who understands movie cameras. It seems as if one lens was fixed to the floor, to enable fuckshots in stand-up mode. There is quite a lot of sophisticated editing too: something well within the range of a gifted amateur, of course, but hardly the sort of expertise you can hire easily in Bangkok, not surreptitiously anyway. On the other hand, no smart operator connected to the proposed victim wants to be in the country at the time the movie is shot, and you after all were her ex-husband, with a criminal record and a known penchant for making skin flicks. What to do? Training, I think. They gave you a couple of ex-KR to train. The thing about them, they will obey all instructions to the letter. You didn’t need for them to be inspired—you merely needed them to produce the base product for you to edit, perhaps while you were in Angkor Wat. I think they sent you the rushes via e-mail. The Khmer had to be trained, though, and you wanted a cut. Was it a percentage or cash?”
    A long pause, during which I think he will not speak, then: “Both. It was her idea. She insisted on using me. She wasn’t going to trust anyone else. She’d worked with me before plenty of times. She knew I wasn’t about to screw up.” Looking at me: “And anyway, she was Thai.”
    “Superstition?”
    “You bet. We’d been mostly lucky in what we did together, Damrong and me. Even when we were busted, we managed to turn a profit.”
    “Could you identify the men you trained?”
    A shrug. “Maybe. They were homicidal puppets, like all the others. You don’t necessarily remember ciphers, even when you work with them for a week.”
    “There were rehearsals?”
    “With tailor’s dummies, until they got better. Then we used real live actors.”
    “In Cambodia?”
    “Sure.”
    “Were you aware of any of the other players, apart from your ex-wife?”
    “No. I was kept sealed off from everyone. I never met the stud, either. I just edited his performance.”
    “But what about Tom Smith, the lawyer? He started visiting your apartment after I came to see you.”
    “Up to then I thought he was just the john in that other clip with Damrong. I didn’t know he invested in the snuff movie. I wasn’t invited to meetings or anything. I was controlled by Damrong. Obviously, after they killed her, someone else had to deal with me. They were watching you. After you came to question me the first time, Smith needed to debrief me. He’s good. His questions were a lot harder to deal with than yours. I had to persuade him I didn’t sing, or he would have had me wasted.”
    “Excuse me,” I say, and fish out the cell, which is vibrating in my pocket.
    “Khmer in cars outside Smith’s law offices,” Lek reports. “I’m off to the bank.”
    I close the phone and try not to stare at Baker as if he were already