Bangkok Haunts

back up to Gamon’s hut to retrieve my own, but the battery has run down. Never mind, Kimberley has jumped out of her chopper and is running toward me, combat style, dressed in black coveralls, carrying a sexy-looking two-tone carbine (café au lait on dark chocolate). “What happened?” she says, coming to an abrupt halt, not sure where to point the gun.
    “Damrong’s ghost trapped her brother in her own cadaver so she could use his body while supervising the ritual slaying of those two,” I explain, pointing at Smith and Tanakan. “But I shot the cadaver in the head, which put an end to her scheme. I believe the technical expression is
sympathetic magic.
It’s not due to become available to humanity at large again for another thousand years. Can I borrow your cell phone?”
    She hands it to me, and I plug in a familiar number. “Yamahatosan,” I say, “I have a job for you.”

Epilogue
    Vikorn sent a couple of heavies to arrest me as soon as I reached Bangkok. He has thrown me into the cells while he decides what to do with me. He doesn’t know everything, but he knows enough to realize I stopped being a cop for a certain period of time, during which his squeeze on Tanakan was ruined and the sweetest scam of his life was taken from him. I know he is deciding whether to bump me off or reduce me to some degrading condition of absolute slavery. I’m not too bothered, though. After all, I have a trump up my sleeve. In the meantime I’m enjoying the solitude, the reliable rhythms of incarceration. I don’t even mind the slopping out, although the stench makes me gag; I’m using it as an exercise in Buddhist humility. After forty-eight hours, however, I’m starting to get bored, so I send the Colonel a handwritten note in Thai:: I have a video.
    Never one to be coy when a glittering prize offers itself, he writes back within the hour:: What kind of video?
    : Naked confessions of Khun Tanakan and Khun Smith.

    My rehabilitation is as precipitous as my fall. Now I’m in Vikorn’s office, sitting opposite him.
    “Want a cigar?”
    “You know I don’t smoke tobacco.”
    “How about some ganja? One of the boys busted a dealer with export-quality stuff. Here.” He reaches into his top drawer and tosses a Ziploc bag of dense green vegetation onto his desk. I wasn’t about to accept, but the deep shade of the grass, together with the superabundance of buds, weakens my resolve. As I reach for it, however, he clamps it to his desk with a heavy gnarled old hand.
    “Where’s the video?”
    “At a secret location.”
    “Does it really show them fessing up to everything? Conspiring to make a snuff movie, taking shareholder positions, all that?”
    “Yes. Naked, bent over trestles in a compromising position. It’s very elegantly done. Yammy’s come a long way.”
    “Yammy? You used Yammy?”
    “Is there anyone better?”
    “Okay, how much do you want?”
    “I want thirty percent for charity, plus tweny-five million dollars in seed money for Yammy’s feature film. It sounds like a lot, but you’re going to grab half of Tanakan’s fortune, so why should you care?”
    “Show me the video first.”
    “Do I look that stupid?”
    “Okay, okay, if it’s as good as you say, I’ll agree.”
    “Write that down. I want you on your honor.”
    He frowns, then takes out his pen, writes, and hands me the contract. I fish a disk out of my pocket, walk over to his DVD player, and switch it on.
     
    It was kind of cozy watching Yammy’s private masterpiece, which had the Colonel chortling and congratulating me. With the FBI standing next to him wearing her new gun, Yammy used two cameras to somehow make magic of a sorry tale. He made Smith and Tanakan confess slowly, deliberately, as if reciting poetry on a stark stage in front of the hut the elephants had shattered. They speak in solemn, well-modulated voices, as they recount every detail of their contract with Damrong and the morbid passion that led to it. Yammy and I used her extensive notes as a kind of film script.
    Sometimes I think things are almost normal again, but of course they are not, because they never were. The illusion of continuity is busted, my concentration shot. Yesterday, hardly aware of what I was doing, I bought a bronze statue of the elephant god Ganesh to use as a paperweight on my desk. Not a minute passes without thoughts of Gamon. I frequently find an excuse to go to the
wat
to meditate. Even then I see him everywhere. Something